Interview with Melissa Furness

"Wake”, 2008, mixed media on canvas, 48 x 48 inches

During your travels throughout Eastern Europe, what initially interested you in exploring the community baths?

I was originally drawn to the public baths of Eastern Europe because of my own experience of a different kind of awareness of self. It was a bit unnerving to be nearly naked amongst a group of strangers that one could not communicate with. The baths also have a specific method of use, with directions of this or that temperature of water to dip into first, second, or third, etc, when to shower, as well as specific ailments that this or that water will help to cure, all directions written in Hungarian and also sometimes German. Navigating through such a space was an odd experience that made me look on my surroundings in a new way and made me reconsider my identity.

I remember distinctly my final day in Budapest following following an artist’s residency that I was involved in. I spent the day doing all of my favorite things, which, of course, included visiting the baths--or “taking the waters”, as some might say. The Gellert was one of my favorites, with its beautiful indoor and outdoor pools. I remember sitting there alone outside on the sun deck, quietly observing the people around me. There was a sense of removal, where I could exist and look upon this place and these people from a different mode of vision. Since I did not know Hungarian, and it was so difficult to learn, I felt that my sense of these people was flat and almost cartoonish.

As I sat there on my towel, there was suddenly a loud blare of music coming from a speaker somewhere overhead, and then a voice spouting out something that I could not understand. Then, as I looked around me, all of the people began to rise and flock over to one particular large pool. Soon after, the waves began. This was really quite comical to me, further accentuating my sense of these people as “characters” and a sort of communal identity. Yet in the place, the surroundings itself, I could sense the great depth of the history that it held, although I may not have been able to fully understand it. I am interested in this contrast of a deep and shallow sense of place.

The image of water and figures swimming seems prevalent throughout many of your pieces, how does this connect to the idea of travel and exploration, and the unknown?

Water is a substance that can take on many forms and that is symbolic of different things. Water can be used for healing, for sustaining, for ritual and spirituality, for cleansing and rebirth, and as well can consume and drown and cause great disaster. I am interested in these polarities of expressing life and death, happiness and tragedy in a single work. The unknown is what comes before and after this. Water also represents bodies of water, which separate large groups of people and which also brings them together as we find ourselves often traveling to destinations that contain water.

“Accouchement”, 2007, mixed media painting: acrylic, screen print, digital transfer, oil on canvas, 47 x 47 inches

Detail of “Accouchement”, 2007, mixed media painting: acrylic, screen print, digital transfer, oil on canvas, 47 x 47 inches

Do you feel that regardless of location, the individual is continually encouraged to reconcile the discrepancies between the “internal fantasy” and the “external reality”?

Yes, but I think of it more in the way of melding past and present histories. Living today in a Capitalistic society brings things into our landscape which create an odd sense of reality, with media imagery scattered amongst more solid forms. This sense of old and new is most noticeable in Eastern Europe, which is fairly new to Capitalism, and which also has a history reaching far back to Roman times. There are these architectural ruins that have stood the test of time, but are incomplete. Their original form is lost, to be completed today by the growth of these media images that turn the landscape into a mixture of flat and graphic imagery and deep and solid historical structures.

It is also the sense of melding our fantasized sense of a place with the actuality of a place. Before and during travel, we imagine a place to be idealized, something better than our actual lives. We are given media images of a place on-line or through advertising which presents a place as perhaps more beautiful than itself, and in our minds we create the place as a kind of simulated reality. Upon arriving in a place, this sense of reality becomes at odds with actuality.

"Descent”, 2009, mixed media on canvas, 48 x 48 inches

How do you approach the idea of personal identity in your work?

I consider identity to be extremely multifaceted. We are ourselves in our daily lives, but then we become someone else according to different circumstances—in travel, when around different people, at the workplace, or on-line, as well as group identities during war or at peace, a “people”, a nation, etc. In my work I think of identity in the sense of “foreign bodies”. The figures are like avatars, flat characters that are stand-ins for the self, a self that may be quite different from the representation. These figures also hover above lines of communication and miscommunication as we speak perhaps even the same language, but are somewhat or even entirely misunderstood. The figures are also orchestrated at times, organized as in warfare or political fanfare when we become one of a “people”. We are represented as a group with individuality lost.

When starting a new piece, how do you approach your color selection?

When I began the paintings of the baths series, I was most fascinated with the challenge of producing color that appeared to be glowing from within the painting as in a digital/video screen rather than reflected off of the surface of it. I most often look to video and film for color inspiration—silent films, the colorized films of the 1950s, and foreign films like Bollywood with their costuming and fantastical drama, as well as video artists such as Bill Viola and Pipilotti Rist amongst others. With color, I look to create a confusion between this type of enhanced video color and painted color. It is fascinating to see the change from the screen to print to paint. I am interested in playing with these subtle shifts in hue and intensity.

“Butdress”, 2006, mixed media painting: acrylic, screen print, digital transfer, and oil paint on wood panel, 24 x 24 inches

How important is your technical approach, with its layering of different media, to conveying your message?

My technical approach has always been an integral aspect to the meaning of my work. To me, the two cannot be discussed separately. The process supports and is fueled by the conceptual ideas. My work involves an intense method of distinct layering, incorporating both mechanical and hand-painted elements. This process really speaks to the layering of cultures and media that we view in society today. The viewer might then think of themselves as excavators, digging through the layers to create various connections with their eyes.

It’s interesting to compare your treatment of the figures in your works with their surroundings. In your Ruins series the people seem to be almost amorphous and float among the rigid and static architectural elements. Does this depiction of the human form in your eyes speak to the transitory nature of people? That we are in constant flux, alternating between environment and personal history?

Yes. The new series is very much about this process of people rising from the earth and returning to it again. The patterning speaks to this idea, a process of repetition and recycling. It is interesting that although we as people rise and fall in a fairly short period of time, the things that we create can continue on for great lengths. What we leave behind has some sense of who we are or were, but it is also transformed into something else as it is translated and reinterpreted by future generations. Fragments become recycled wholes which are partial truths turned into something of a fantasy or simulated reality.

How much does technology contribute to your work, both conceptually and technically?

The use of technology in my work always begins with research, with looking at image after image until something strikes me that I can work with. I do this with nearly all of the elements in the work. I search out patterns for their specific meaning or historical origins, then produce my own outlines of them in Illustrator and turn them into photo screen prints on the canvas. The actual spaces that I choose to represent are appropriated images that are then morphed, something repeated and/or recombined with other images in order to produce an unusual effect and then applied to the work through various methods. The figures are also extracted from numerous sources and arranged in relation to the environment. The lines are taken from actual flight patterns of planes. All of these elements come together to provide a sense that this is a place that one has seen before, but that you can’t quite place it. The viewer might say, “I know that,” but then they don’t. Conceptually, I am also interested in how we navigate the virtual space of digital media versus how we navigate actual places and our feelings of rootedness—of having come from somewhere and having known a place by having lived there or stayed there for a time.

Is traveling still inspiring to you and do you have any plans to do so in the near future?

Yes. I hope to go to another artist’s residency in Greece next Winter, and have proposed a study abroad course in Italy for next summer. I look forward to the insights that these new experiences might give me.

“Pre-figured”, 2006, mixed media painting: acrylic, screen print, digital transfer, oil on wood panel, 24 x 24 inches