Melissa Gordon
Scanner Paintings
I often begin bodies of work by doing multiple experimental trials that rarely get exhibited, and I have been making paintings on a scanner for a number of years. I studied photography as well as printmaking and painting in college, and I saw no need to commit to one or the other.
Photography was a passion for me growing up and through college- and continues to be in that many of my favourite artists work in photography.
I began scanning used medicine packages in 2017 or so, and used some of these as source material for the book ‘The Gesture is a Liquid’ which had a text of the same title. I was thinking about the fluid of painting being in direct contact with the leftovers of materials that had gone into the fluidness of my body: painkillers, birth control, vitamins. I was thinking about the term ‘burn rate’ as something to do with money but our bodies as well, and could gestures in paint kind of get involved in that?
For my residency at the Frans Masereel Centrum in the winter of 2023, I spent a number of days working on these scans on an A3 scanner. Whilst these have not been shown, nor do I know what place they inhabit necessarily in my public practice- they feel very illustrative of things I am repeatedly looking into: mess, off-cuts of objects that accumulate on the same level as painterly gestures. Why? These are all objects I have exposed to silkscreen like photograms: mesh, ropes, pom poms, bras. Objects I collect because I think light will pass in an interesting way through them. As compositions of trash and references and a levelling of painterly gestures, they have legs, as I might say- but I don’t know where they are walking yet.
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Photography was a passion for me growing up and through college- and continues to be in that many of my favourite artists work in photography.
I began scanning used medicine packages in 2017 or so, and used some of these as source material for the book ‘The Gesture is a Liquid’ which had a text of the same title. I was thinking about the fluid of painting being in direct contact with the leftovers of materials that had gone into the fluidness of my body: painkillers, birth control, vitamins. I was thinking about the term ‘burn rate’ as something to do with money but our bodies as well, and could gestures in paint kind of get involved in that?
For my residency at the Frans Masereel Centrum in the winter of 2023, I spent a number of days working on these scans on an A3 scanner. Whilst these have not been shown, nor do I know what place they inhabit necessarily in my public practice- they feel very illustrative of things I am repeatedly looking into: mess, off-cuts of objects that accumulate on the same level as painterly gestures. Why? These are all objects I have exposed to silkscreen like photograms: mesh, ropes, pom poms, bras. Objects I collect because I think light will pass in an interesting way through them. As compositions of trash and references and a levelling of painterly gestures, they have legs, as I might say- but I don’t know where they are walking yet.
