Vibrant Matter
While art is Melissa Vogley Woods’ first love, activism might be a close second.
Having grown up as a self-described “distracted kid,” the Columbus resident says art has always been her passion. It has led to a lifelong pursuit of truth and identity, with her art as the mode of exploration.
“I remember being in class and thinking, ‘This doesn’t relate to being an artist,’ so I just wouldn’t do it,” she says, laughing.
Woods has studied an impressively diverse array of mediums. While she started her career in realism, her art has since morphed into abstract pieces that have everything and nothing in common with one another. Her studio is filled with paintings on canvases large and small, and a carefully curtained-off section for plastering. She even dabbles in video and sculpture.
While her methods are varied, all of her art comes from a couple of key inspirations that have followed her over the course of her career. She is focused on the idea of how femininity is expressed, and how it has been expressed over time through art –and, perhaps even more importantly, how society has been repressing female artists through the ages.
“People that come to museums want to see male artists because they’re simply more famous, because that is dictated by sexism and society,” Woods says.
Per an essay by arts writer and producer Camille Gajewski, women have been systematically shut out of critical and popular arts throughout history. When you look at the most vaunted artists of even the last few hundred years, very few of the most famous ones are women. There are many reasons for this. The first is that for a very long time, art pursued by women was seen more as crafts or female pastime than an actual discipline. This, combined with persistent gender biases, meant that up until the 1960s, very few women received wide recognition as artists. The preeminent galleries of the world are disproportionately filled with the work of men.
Only about 30 percent of artists represented by commercial galleries (in the United States) are women. - National Museum of Women in the Arts
Woods has been preoccupied by this dichotomy of power and representation for a long time. The way she has expressed this idea, however, has changed drastically. While she originally presented this discourse with strongly realistic femme figures at the start of her career, she has since shifted to abstract concepts that can better explore the subtleties of the female journey.
“I felt like figure was too singular, too obvious,” she says. “I wanted to show the contrast between a powerful thing and a less powerful thing; the conflict in the world.”
Arch with Yellow Beam
Today, her art is filled with vibrant colors and soft shapes, offset by powerful arches inspired by Roman architecture. The unique folded shapes often featured centrally on her canvases are actually derived from the shape of stacked quilts. They represent art by women that is often owned by museums and never put on display.
Like quilts, which are often put in storage and rarely used, these pieces of art are frequently forgotten. But even without that background knowledge, the viewer feels an unmistakable femininity in the softly blended shapes, thrown even more sharply into relief by the solid, geometric arches that represent a male-dominated society.
Matt Vogley
Untitled Form 7
Woods’ next series will continue exploring the shapes that have become familiar in her pieces, though she wants to experiment more with binaries versus color, introducing more contrasting shades of black with her typically bright palettes. She continues to paint while delving into other art forms, such as video and sculpture, with the goal of creating immersive and interactive exhibits where the different mediums flow together harmoniously.
“The painting is more subtle because it’s abstract and based in tradition and history,” she says. “The video is a connection to femme performativity and the performance of the female self as it relates to value and feminism.”
While Woods knows the average viewer may not understand the whole picture of her work at first viewing, she hopes it will spur more conversation about representation in art. Looking to the future, she urges women to support each other in the arts, and galleries to look past gender and strive to include more art by women in their portfolios.
On View
6 plus 1
Featuring work by Melissa Vogley Woods
Through April 22
Hammond Harkins Galleries
Taylor Woodhouse is a contributing writer. Feedback welcome at gbishop@cityscenemediagroup.com.
