ARTIST STATEMENT
I have an oath in my studio practice: follow the work wherever it takes me, and go with it as long as it needs. I focus on color and form to create paintings that act as portals to the unknown. Each piece undergoes its own birth story that begins with a painting recipe, an experiment, and some leap of faith. My work entails being cognizant of how nature and time infuse our senses poetically into another realm that unlocks how we see the world. The paintings do what I think life does–they collapse into fractals or moments of sheer color and magic because there cannot always be words for what we feel, and we sometimes have to let go in order to see.
ARTIST BIO
Melissa Capasso earned her MFA from Brooklyn College in 2016. Recent exhibitions include several prominent group shows, a two-person show with Ava Warner at the Shirley Project Space (Brooklyn, NY), and solo shows at Gold/Scopophilia (Montclair, NJ) and Sweet Lorraine Gallery (Brooklyn, NY). In a review of her work for Two Coats of Paint, Jennifer Rose Bonilla-Edgington wrote that Capasso’s “work’s energy invites viewers’ engagement and its intricacy stimulates them to search their own minds for connections to the content, sparking the neurons.” Capasso teaches painting and drawing at Suffolk County Community College and has also taught at Rutgers-Newark. Residencies and honors include the Elizabeth Murray Artist Residency and the Edward F. Albee Foundation Visual Arts Fellowship.