Opening Reception: Friday, September 3rd, 7:00-10:00 PM
Exhibition Dates: September, 3rd-26th, 2021
Stock Pile Book Presale & Birds Printed Ephemera Event: Saturday, September 25th, 1:00-3:00 PM
Rosalux Gallery is pleased to announce the exhibition Faux, new photographs by Melissa Borman & Areca Roe. The two-person exhibition brings together the artists’ shared interest in investigating their physical and emotional relationships to the natural world. Featuring constructed scenes and interventions within the landscape works in the exhibition illustrate our culture’s conflicting desires to both preserve and control the natural world.
Depicting ceramic birds collected from friends, family members, and thrift stores, Melissa’s ongoing photography project, Birds, is about the fragile things we love and treasure. We make space for them, we care for them, and yet more often than not someone will find them neglected or damaged despite our good intentions. The work asserts that they, like so many imperfect and once abandoned things, are worthy of care and attention.
Areca’s work consists of lenticular 3D photographs that highlight trees and plants native to Minnesota, juxtaposed with human figures and floral patterned backgrounds. As biomes shift due to climate change, the locations these trees can survive in is shifting as well. The photographs revere the trees themselves, but also refer to human interdependence on the natural world and desire to connect to the landscape, however misguided those attempts at connection may be.
Melissa Borman is a Minneapolis-based photographer and installation artist. Her work addresses the interconnected relationship embedded in using landscape elements as metaphors to depict our human stories and how these depictions shape our ideas of our surroundings. She is particularly interested in how the methods we use to share stories, from fairy tales to social media, impact our collective understanding of the natural world.
Melissa is faculty and Chair of Fine and Performing Arts at Century College in White Bear Lake, MN. She earned her MFA from the San Francisco Art Institute. Melissa has exhibited nationally and internationally at venues including Regional Cultural Center, Co. Donegal, Ireland, Galería Valid Foto BCN, Barcelona, Spain, Museum of Arts and Sciences, Macon, GA, Filter Space, Chicago, IL, and Griffin Museum, Boston. She is a recipient of the Minnesota State Arts Board Artist Initiative Grant, Metropolitan Regional Arts Council Grant Next Step Grant, and Rochester Art Center’s Jerome Emerging Artist Award.
Areca Roe is an artist based in Mankato and Minneapolis, working primarily with photography and video. A recurrent theme in her work is the interface between the natural and human domains. More recently her work explores how biomes are being affected by climate change, and how humans make our marks on the landscape with our activities.
Areca teaches photography and video art at Minnesota State University, Mankato. She received her MFA in Studio Arts, from the University of Minnesota in 2011. Her work has been exhibited nationally and internationally, and she has been a member of Rosalux since 2015. Roe has also received several grants and fellowships in support of her work, including the Minnesota State Arts Board Artist Initiative Grant and the Art(ists) on the Verge Fellowship. Her work has been featured on sites such as Colossal, Slate, Juxtapoz, WIRED, and Fast Company, and in Der Spiegel Wissen magazine.