Postcard

Melissa Pokorny is a sculptor and Associate Professor at the University of Illinois. Her work has been shown at the Center for the Arts at Yerba Buena Gardens, Southern Exposure, New Langton Arts and Gallery Paule Anglim in San Francisco; Food House in Los Angeles; Platform Gallery in Seattle; Midway Contemporary Art in Minneapolis; Gallery 400 and Bodybuilder and Sportsman in Chicago; and Front Room Gallery in Brooklyn. She was the recipient of an Illinois Arts Council Grant in 2005. Her work is in the collections of the Oakland Museum of California, Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and Orange County Art Museum. The collision of things removed from the real world with intentionally hand crafted forms made in the studio is a continuing focus in Pokorny's work. Most of the forms are explicitly representational and refer to architecture, the natural world, and animals. The resulting subject confusion, blurring of modes of representation (for example, clunky realism, surrealism and hyperrealism) and bizarre narrative possibilities act as screens for the projection of anxieties surrounding our relationship to otherness in the midst of the imminently familiar. Pokorny engages the contingent status of objects, artifice and realism, narrative and representation. The relative positioning of the natural world and its animal “others” as it relates to the domestic milieu is central to her work. By using overtly artificial means to represent space, coupled with uncannily realistic animal figurines and casts, Pokorny questions our estrangement from and subsequent longing for connection to the natural world, and the resulting substitution of the real by the fake.