Melissa Gwyn is an artist who lives in San Francisco and teaches drawing and painting at UC Santa Cruz.

In my work I consider the word reproduction as it pertains to biology and art, and about morphology, both as a study of the form of words and of living forms. Thirty years ago, I made art about words in the form of still life paintings of molecular models, where the arrangement of elements “spelled” the title and subject of my paintings. In later works I explored morphology in pieces about heredity, authority and truth in a series entitled “Fabergenic.” The root of the surname Faberge is faber, which means “to make.” In all of my paintings the subject of making is tied to its opposite, destroying, and this duality is evident on the surface of my paintings. 

Concepts of making and fabricating merge with my habit of listening to news while I paint. Stories about red and blue tribal struggles possess my attention as I imagine the shape our politics will take. I envisage a disfigured circle as the poles of the Left and Right arc towards one another, becoming a sublime gyre animated by the commerce of news.  Inside the spin, definitions don’t nest inside the formation of words: conservatism becomes decadence, and “progressive,” denotes a course of worsening health, rather than the values I once identified with. As the roots of those terms lose their morphological boundaries and beget new words, I try to make visual and verbal sense of this political maelstrom. In paintings inspired by circus posters, hand-painted signs, and medical imaging, I speculate on the culture war and its effect on the health of institutions and the reasoning capacity of the body politic. 

Website: melissagwyn.com