Lauren Powell Presents:

~ Melanie Delach ~

Sublime Studies on Paper

Melanie Delach’s textured, sublime self portraits examine access and visibility in the spaces she occupies as a queer woman, particularly how the private spaces within us become public. The shadowy figures, shown in silhouette, are fighting to make themselves seen and known, revealing the conflict of existing as a jumble of energy, uncertainty, and connection in the geometric environments they operate within. The figures almost seem to want to merge with their environments despite the difference in movement and gesture between them. Melanie’s drawings provide a different kind of vulnerability and intimacy from her paintings. In these drawings graphite, ink, colored pencil, water-soluble crayons, and other mixed media are placed as boundaries or borders, as well as intrusions into the spaces she is protecting and navigating. No color is completely opaque, and every bit of the drawings are concerned with the spaces in between. These drawings are a regular part of Melanie’s practice and where all of her painting’s blurred narratives begin - an urgent execution of ideas from the mind out into our physical space. See more of Melanie’s work here: https://www.melaniedelach.com/.

Melanie Delach is a mixed media artist from Long Island, New York. Delach lives and works in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. She received her BFA in Studio Art from Adelphi University in 2017 and an MFA at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in 2019. Her work has been exhibited in group shows in New York at Anna Zorina Gallery, LatchKey Gallery, and in Philadelphia at Tiger Strikes Asteroid and PAFA’s museum, to name a few. She received the Fine Arts Venture Fund and The Judith McGregor Caldwell Purchase Prize. Her work is part of the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts permanent collection.