Niebla Rosa, Nave Azul /

Melissa Mejía

Exhibition date14/03/2024

LocationRoberto Pastoriza #412 | Torre Altri Tempi | Ensanche Piantini.

Melissa Mejía's introspective journey in search of healing through optimistic scenes that help her reaffirm her faith in kindness, believing that there will always be a new world to discover tomorrow.

Melissa draws from comics, steampunk, kitsch, and "pop surrealism" on a journey to the past with all the Renaissance lineage in her transformation and vision, starting from blowing out her 15 candles on a visit to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. Some time later, she re-imagines it, and in her process of artistic formation and construction, she sees herself in these robotized gazes trapped in her "blossom girls," using them to escape common places.

At first, as a creator, she may not have been aware of why these women are the way they are, but over time, she discovered a purpose: not wanting to define what beauty was, but rather creating a space of silence and wonder through them, women of an amoral beauty, fiercely feminine, and committed to a synesthetic perception, where the heroine has escaped the guillotine from the Palace of Versailles itself to land and find herself in her own world as a kaleidoscopic mirror revealing the past, present, and future.

This body of work, meticulously detailed, in which 1,200 hours in a piece are not enough to leave the soul in her fantasy of freeing these female figures, who take control of the ship and explore new territories among flamboyants and bayahibe roses.

"I'm Back, baby (the musical)," a reference to herself that turns out to be contradictory because Melissa has never left; she has always been in the collective memory of those who have always loved her art. From darkness, she found light, after an internal transmutation of the visual compilation of her universe among objects, circumstances, and places that have captivated her throughout her life.

Orlando Isaac
Curator

About Melissa Mejía

She was born on September 1, 1979 in Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic, where she still lives and works in his studio.

She was a restless child and her mother often told her that she will never forget the look of fascination on her face when she put a pencil in his hand and began scribbling lines on a piece of paper. She said it was the only thing that kept her calm.

She is self-taught in drawing. She practiced taking portraits when posed for her, and also copied things from books, magazines, movies, and nature.

At 15 years old, after brief painting classes with a Dominican artist, she was selling portraits, still lifes and landscapes. On the other hand, she also painted things that inspired her and made her own clothes.

Because she never stopped creating, she realized that she felt emotionally torn between the things that really inspired her and the things she could sell. She will find the freedom to unify the two and do it with her own voice. She wanted to be an artist and she wanted it to be her profession. She felt that she needed guidance to achieve it and she thought she could get it into an art school, but she was discouraged from going because it was considered at the time an unstable profession and unsuitable for making a decent living. Additionally, she addresses the taboos about sex and drugs that surround art schools and the very moral education where she comes from.

She had to change careers several times during college, work hard and persevere to earn a living and the support of her family, to finally go to Art School at age 23.

During the two years at the School she had a deep connection with her work through self-portraits and it was the starting point of the style that I have been developing since
so.

In 2005 she graduated with honors in Fine Arts and Illustration from Altos el Chavón, School of Design. She has never stopped working on developing her own style, which is constantly evolving. She has worked with several international art galleries and has participated in numerous collectives and art fairs. The only time she stopped creating was when she struggled with substance abuse in her late twenties and early thirties. It was a very sad time for her because, among other losses, she lost connection with herself and with her work, she could not paint..

In 2015 she decided on a life of sobriety and the years since then have been like a capsule of her entire life process as an artist. She struggled the first few years of her recovery and because of all the anxiety she was processing she found it difficult to hold a paintbrush for more than a few minutes. Once again, she persisted and managed to integrate her life experiences.