Fluere - Laura Stack & Fabricated Real - Melissa Loop

Rosalux Gallery is pleased to present two solo shows by Minneapolis artists Melissa Loop and Laura Stack. In Fabricated Real, Loop’s landscape paintings use her travels to Mayan ruins in Central America as a subject to explore notions of how we form assumptions about authenticity, place, and spirituality through our explorations and ill-informed ideas of other cultures. In Fluere, Stack’s abstract ink paintings suggest an amalgam of the natural and the synthetic where shapes morph into odd, though vaguely familiar forms and ink patterns bloom, dissolve, and disperse.

About these paintings, Melissa Loop says: “I was in Tikal sitting on top of the highest temple after sunset with about a dozen other tourists. We were listening to our Mayan guide tell us a story about him and his twin brother born in the rainforest. The Mayans believe that twins are of the gods. A sign of good luck. In the distance, the tops of the other temples peaked above the rainforest and we watched a lightning storm dance in the sky. Part of the scene was a setup created for us tourists. However, part of it was a rare moment in time that contained all of the mystic and spiritual clarity that we search for when traveling to faraway places. The setup cliche became an actual moment of transcendence. By making these half fantasy paintings, I participate in the cliche. However, I can’t help but search for those rare moments where everything transcends and becomes magical again.” Melissaloop.com

Laura Stack’s hyper-color ink paintings allude to a bodily, cellular or chemical world with its own rules and physics. Her work suggests paradoxes and simultaneities; the paradox that living things can now embody synthetic elements, the simultaneity of flatness and depth, and the illusion of movement that can be suggested within still images. Stack’s art practice is motivated by her curiosity in nature and science. Her paintings are an imagined mirroring of artificial biological or what we might call the “new natural”. Laurastackart.com

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