UNTITLED, ART Miami Beach OVR 2020: Melinda Braathen

When painting the figure, Melinda Braathen is often met with the impulse to paint into or directly over it. After several passes, what remains is an interpretation of internal psychology and physiology, in an effort to render visible everyday rhythms and sensations arising inside the body, as well as external forces exerted onto it.

In a new series, Braathen leans further into this abstract visual language to more directly explore interpersonal dynamics. She engages with this most readily within the space of conversation. The rhythm, tone, pressures and content held within the human voice and body physiologically affect us all differently. They help give shape to the evanescent structures we are continuously building as a means to understand each other and ultimately transgress the space between us.

Braathen relies on drawing to initially capture or hold onto fleeting memories or impressions. The abstract language allows her to go past the representational triggers and reflect more specifically on the emerging sensations, thoughts, and innovative actions within the space of conversation that have the power to shift us slightly or even irreversibly. While Braathen mostly draws from lived experience, she also pulls from passages of books and interviews between innovative thinkers from a variety of fields to explore the inexhaustible architecture of conversation and human encounter.

Thoughts Make Their Own Distinct Shapes, 2020, explores the inner-workings of a thoughtful question, comment, or insight. They have the capacity to spark the imagination and often require a deeper kind of internal search to adequately respond. The orange seed-like form in the painting represents such a question. Emerging from the oval-shape is an illuminated interior space coming into form. In this painting, the diagonal line separates the interior from the exterior world. This painting asks what creative acts and risks can be performed within daily interactions to transgress the space between people in ways that continuously brings us back to a thoughtful question?

V. Woolf - A Column of Spray, 2020, explores 20th Century modernist writer Virginia Woolf. It references a passage from her Novel To The Lighthouse, which follows the Ramsay family living in Scotland.

Woolf uses common literary devices to move through several layers of experience in order to describe the interpersonal dynamics between father, son and mother. However, Braathen finds inspiration in the innovation she employs to capture the intangible physiological responses and raw energy. How can this be translated into paint? Braathen made several iterations, initially depicting the father standing over the mother and son, but with each pass the figures dissolved into a series of abstract forms. What remained were the undercurrents— the direction of attention, the expenditure of energy, and the subtle actions made by Mrs. Ramsay to lessen the anger and irritation between father and son. Braathen uses color (hot and cold, expansive and contractive) to further describe the psychological undertones.