Melissa Pokorny

Instagram: @melpok62

Website: https://melissapokorny.com

Bio: Melissa Pokorny is a sculptor living in Urbana, IL. She has exhibited her sculpture and installations in venues across the United States. Solo exhibitions include Gallery Paule Anglim, San Francisco; Platform Gallery, Seattle; Devening Projects and editions, Chicago; Front Room Gallery, NYC; SHED Projects, New Orleans and Cleveland, DEMO Projects, Springfield, IL; and the Peeler Art Center at DePauw University, New Castle Indiana. Selected group shows include NONSTNDRD in Sauget IL; John Michael Kohler Art Center, Sheboygan; Gallery 400, Chicago; Heaven Gallery, Chicago; Slow Gallery, Chicago; Violet Poe Projects, Normal; Galleries at Illinois State University, Normal; Usable Space, Milwaukee; New Langton Arts, San Francisco; and Yerba Buena Gardens, San Francisco. Her work is held in collections by the Orange County Museum of Art; the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive; The Richard L. Nelson Museum at UC Davis; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; and The Krannert Art Museum at the University of Illinois. Pokorny received her MFA from UC Davis in 1988. She’s a Professor in the School of Art & Design at the University of Illinois, Urbana Champaign, where she also serves as Executive Associate Director of the School.

Statement: The work included in Sweaty Armpits was made during the height of COVID closures. I wanted to revisit an earlier work of mine, Unmoored and Adrift, from 2011. That piece was about the destabilizing effect that being underground has on the human body. Multiple images of cave features and spotlights made to look like “natural” cave formations were attached to tilted surfaces, creating a raft-like surface that conveyed the anxiety felt in unknown environments—particularly as we encounter unpeopled or “wild” places. In the midst of the COVID lockdown, feeling completely unmoored and riddled with the anxiety of the moment, like many people, I turned to the outdoors as a place of safety and respite. Ironically, the desire for escape overcame the concomitant fear of the unfamiliar, especially as it attaches to female bodies made vulnerable through solitary walks and forest exploration. The respite from one fear or state of anxiety demanded the confrontation of another. Cultural and natural histories connected to landscapes are typically unseen, forgotten, or overlooked-- often rendered invisible through time, scale, willful erasure, or simply by becoming a too-familiar part of the background. The work in this show considers the ways that place, location, memory, history, and the environment are in constant flux, congealing through time and events into new configurations, relationships, and states of being. Residues of the deep past and human-initiated tragedies cling to the present, haunting and troubling our relationships to places, things, and landscapes.