Melissa Loop

Melissa Loop is a contemporary painter living in Minneapolis. Her work has been exhibited at venues throughout the United States, including Breeze Block Gallery in Portland, OR; grayDuck Gallery in Austin, TX; and Yes.Oui.Si Space in Boston, MA. A well-known Twin Cities artist, her paintings have been featured in shows at the Minnesota Museum of American Art, Burnet Gallery, Soo Visual Art Center, Art of This, and Rosalux Gallery. Her paintings have also been on view in international exhibitions at the National Galleries in Edinburgh, Scotland; Direktorenhaus Museum for Arts, Crafts and Design in Berlin, Germany; and Galeria Casa Colon in Merida, Mexico. She is a 2013 and 2017 recipient of the Minnesota State Arts Board Artist Initiative Grant, a 2012 Jerome Foundation Fellow, and a 2006 Vanderlip Travel Grant awardee. Rebecca Wilson, chief curator for Saatchi, named Loop an “Artist to Watch.” Saatchi also recognized Loop in their “Best of 2014” compilation of artists. Loop’s paintings have been featured in print and online publications such as New American Paintings, Beautiful/Decay, Boooom!, Create Mag, Jealous Curator, the Walker Art Center Blog, and the Minneapolis Star Tribune. Loop’s work has been placed in collections both nationally and internationally, including the Microsoft Corporation and Valspar Headquarters.


Artist Statement

I use my travels to explore notions of how we form assumptions about authenticity, place, and spirituality through our ill-informed ideas of other cultures. Many of my paintings are based on my specific travels to both Central America and French Polynesia. While my paintings are based on reality, they are purposefully enhanced in an attempt to recreate rare moments of spiritual transcendence one encounters when taking a pilgrimage to a sacred place. However authentic in desire, this attempt is always in conflict with the reality of being a tourist and an outsider in someone else's culture. The duality of this experience serves as a metaphor for our current cultural anxieties about a potentially foreboding future. Our Pax Americana of the present, with leaders who create a Theater State to keep control, and the impending ecological collapse from our entry into the Anthropocene age, seems reminiscent of the great and mysterious fall of the Mayans. What’s left of their civilization becomes an effective symbol for processing the present. In an era of “fake news” and during a culturally turbulent time in our nation’s history, my paintings explore the space between imagination and reality, spiritual transcendence and skepticism, dream and actuality, hope and despair. How will future generations interpret this particular point in our history? Each painting is made with acrylic on canvas primed with absorbent ground. The paint oozes and drips from the canvas because I spray water onto the wet paint to soften the edges of the forms. This is an intentional process—the paintings evoke the humid climate of the places I visited while conveying dream-like imagery that reinforces a transcendental state. Electric oranges, magentas, and yellows pulse through the earthy browns, ochres, greens, and blacks. The brush strokes are spare and use an economy of mark to evoke the idea of a thing or a landscape, rather than trying to recreate with accuracy.


www.melissaloop.com

Who and/or what are your influences when you were first starting out vs. now?

When I was just starting out, I was really into loose abstract painting. I loved abstract expressionism, Philip Guston, de Kooning, Cecily Brown, Julie Mehretu, and Amy Sillman. It was all about the painterly paintings. I still love those kinds of paintings, but now my biggest influences are Jules de Balincourt, Annie Lapin, Peter Doig, Matisse, and Bonnard.


What is your favorite thing about the material/s you use?

I love how much I can stretch and manipulate acrylic. I can make it act like watercolor, I can make it act like oil paint, I can layer it very thinly or use mediums and build up a surface. I feel much more like a scientist in the way I can experiment with the material.


What would you say is hidden just underneath the surface of your work? Meaning, what are you revealing to your viewers?

I want my paintings to be a little slippery so the meaning will be a little different depending on the viewer and their own life experiences. My favorite kind of art reveals more about the viewer than about the piece itself. Like a Rorschach test. For me, the work is about our struggles for authentic experiences in the digital age.


Can you tell us about a turning point in your practice? Was there a moment when things started clicking?

When I started to make paintings that I liked and I stopped caring if it was smart enough, cool enough, sellable, trendy, etc., that is when I started to develop my own voice and my own visual language (it had a lot to do with reading the letter that Sol LeWitt wrote to Eva Hesse). I went through another shift earlier in my career when I was getting shows and grants for a certain kind of work where I used exclusively found imagery from online, but it didn’t really align with who I was and who I wanted to be in the world. I realized I wanted to chase something authentic rather (even if I failed) than pointing out and adding to how surface everything was becoming with online imagery.


In honor of our women’s issue, who are three women and/or gender nonconforming artists that inspire you?

Annie Lapin, Cecily Brown, and Kara Walker (I had the honor of hearing her give a talk many years ago, and I still feel like she is the most intelligent and insightful artist that I have ever encountered).