With a background in scientific illustration, Melissa Wagner's work uses a variety of methods and media to engage the natural world and illuminate its earthly remnants. A disparate falling of leaves, scattered branches, crushed shells, and dried ferns, emerge from a paintings surface to create organic three-dimensional works that incorporate intense color, texture, and a perpetually changing surface. Through her work, Melissa strives to examine and magnify the disguised processes that envelope the living world while addressing issues concerning reproduction and the environment. Mixing the products of nature themselves with glossy synthetic resin coats, Melissa playfully composes her vision of a world that harnesses natural subjects to construct new models where art, earth, science, and wonder intersect. Melissa draws he inspiration from her love of nature and extensive local and global travels. Originally from Detroit, Melissa has spent the past 10 years in San Francisco and now calls the West Coast her home. Her work has been shown in galleries, restaurants, corporate offices, clubs, and retail stores which include Mandalay Bay, SomArts, The Canvas and Wells Fargo, and is part of collections in Germany, New Zealand, Ireland, and extensively through out the United States. She has participated in San Francisco Open Studios for the past six years, completed a residency at the San Francisco Legion of Honor and De Young Art Center, and recently organized and opened Clara Street Studios in SOMA. She is involved with many projects including the Maitri AIDS Hospice, several mural projects within the Bay Area, and ArtSpan, where she has been an active volunteer with the non-profit organization for over 8 years working on graphic design, signage, marketing and event planning.

TAMA GREENBERG's Artist Statement

“My artwork (paintings and monotypes) is composed of 3 elements with varying emphases: texture, color, and image. My basic medium is acrylic paint. Texture comes from the paint application and collage.  Imagery swings from cerebral landscapes to figurative to organic forms to abstraction. I combine predominantly bright colors with contrasting dark or muted tones to achieve a more complex effect, with transparent layers of unmixed paint used to create more intense colors. Color is very personal. I generally use colors that please me.

But I also approach art as a child, playing with color and shapes spontaneously, much like a large doodle, without a specific subject in mind.

Art to me is pure pleasure, the process being as important as the result.”

I am an assemblage artist.  I construct my art, often by building boxes containing "saved" bits of Americana:  an old toy, a broken gun, a worn baby shoe, a souvenir salt & pepper shaker that someone saved their whold life.  These "saved" objects tell stories about aspects of our American culture's history, a history many do not know.  Often this shared history includes poverty, racism, inferior roles for women, war and child abuse.  I weave a story about someone's life from these old objects to draw the viewer in to witness our contemporary culture's subconscious prejudices.

The images shown here are from two different series:  Panama and Tropical Storm.This body of work is a follow-up to my Rubber Flower series, my homage to Japanese etchings and Chinese ink wash.Deeply influenced by my love of Asian art, Panama and Tropical Storm represent my celebration of calligraphy.  The strokes I capture with my camera may not represent any word but it captures the soul and energy of movement (chi).  The movement of a simple stroke becomes more important than representation of the subject itself.  For me, calligraphy distinguishes itself from other cultural arts because it emphasizes motion and is charged with dynamic life! These images were captured from a trip to Panama City in 2011.  During my walks around various neighborhoods, I couldn’t help but to image these strokes were trying to tell me something? The stories they witnessed?  The motion and dynamic life are definitely apparent.

I use translucent resin as a primary medium in my work to ‘sample’ moments in time and create visceral and oftentimes anthropological investigations of human experience including emotion, thought and memory in a type of conceptual freeze-framing. I manipulate the veiled translucency of the resin and oftentimes incorporate cellular drawings to foster surprise, mystery, and wonder and pique the viewers’ discovery of new realities, bringing that which is often overlooked or under the surface to the forefront. My scientific inquiry of the underlying energy and beauty in nature directs my unique alchemy in both my studio artwork as well as my site-specific, public installations.

One of my recent series of work simultaneously focuses on the ubiquitous barcode of our contemporary consumer-based milieu and the microscopic, cellular world of being. By using an intricate casting and lamination processes of resin with unexpected embedments encased within, I manipulate the graphic construct of the barcode into a captivating visual paradigm and then incorporate my hand drawn interpretations of carefully chosen cellular imagery to augment and heighten the intended effect and message of each piece/installation.