Melissa Diaz – Artist at Home (with an Audience)

When: 9/22/2020, 7pm
Where: on ZOOM
Meeting ID: 868 6349 3559, Passcode: 155998

Melissa is a latinx artist, art therapist, professor of art therapy & community arts organizer. She integrates these roles by threading wellness and inclusion throughout. Melissa primarily works in interactive installation art, exploring of inner (intrapsychic) & outer space (interpsychic), while highlighting the power of playful engagement. In all areas she considers, growth, healing, transitional space, and community.

As both an artist and an art therapist, I consider space, relationships, and holding environment. My work is an ongoing exploration of inner and outer habitats that reflect elements of nature, growth, transition, and coexistence. I am interested in portraying the tension and ambiguity of micro and macro environments. Within these environments, I aim to form a transitional space that welcomes play and introspection. This space represents experience in between subjective and objective reality, a space of pure creativity and making of the imaginable, tangible.
While I organically inhabit this experience in the studio and therapeutic space, I hope to cultivate it further within the exhibition space. I do so by the use of whimsical arrangements, interactive elements, and choice of material. I invite the viewer to engage with the work with a sense of childlike curiosity and practice of active imagination. By utilizing found objects, scholastic and non-traditional material, I encourage accessibility and inclusion of art-making, demystifying of the artist, and transformative powers of creativity.
In my process, I practice art-making as a source of meditation, meditation that allows me to delve into intergenerational making and respectfully reappropriate the textile work of my ancestry. In this self-soothing state, I utilize repetition of form to create a rhythm and conceptually reflect how the individual pieces in a community can affect space, progress, and development. In creating these pieces, I imbue them with various healing energies that I need in that moment. My hope is that these energies vibrate to visitors, forming a relationship with the surroundings, individuals and paralleling my framework as an art therapist.

Moderated by Monika Wuhrer.

You can see previous Artists at Home (with an audience) when we called the program Soupkitchen on ZOOM.
We also have done a ton of interviews with Artists at Home.