TRACES REMAIN Opened Friday May 12th and continued through August 6th 2017 at Historic Arkansas Museum, Trinity Gallery. Honored to show with Dawn Holder.
Curator, Carey Voss, writes
"Melissa Cowper-Smith is enamored with memory, with forgetting, with the fleeting nature of everything around us. Her recent work is filled with markers of anxiety: abandoned building projects, roads made impassable by fire, domestic spaces empty of inhabitants, a sense of urgency and constant movement. Bright, saturated hues reminiscent of Color Field painting and sinuous gestural marks may initially turn the viewer’s attention toward surface and form, but delve deeper into the layers of atmospheric space created by collaging photographs digitally, and the work as a whole pushes toward an exploration of content. Melissa’s multimedia art is trapped between worlds: the past and its love of analog processes and handwork, and the present/future with its preference for the slick digital surfaces of high-definition photography and video. Cowper-Smith’s 2D pieces begin as acrylic paintings collaged with photographs and manipulated using specialized computer software. The resulting images are then pigment-printed onto paper made by hand from cotton and other plant fibers grown at Wildland Gardens, Melissa’s eco-farm. Each still image, each print, represents only a single moment in Cowper-Smith’s stop-action videos, multimedia projections that play with the representation of time’s passage and the ephemeral quality of memory. Melissa Cowper-Smith grew up in Canada where she received a BFA in painting from the University of Victoria in British Columbia. Later, she received a Master of Fine Arts degree from Hunter College in New York City. Melissa and her husband moved to Morrilton, Arkansas in 2011."