Melissa Wallen

Melissa Wallen approaches painting as a relational space, where color, gesture, form, and atmosphere continually act upon one another. Her paintings occupy a shifting threshold between abstraction and representation, allowing forms to suggest landscape, body, vegetation, architecture, or atmosphere without fully resolving into any one thing. Wallen is drawn to these moments of unstable recognition, when an image begins to take shape while continuing to hold the possibility of becoming something else.

Perspective collapses, scale becomes uncertain, and distinctions between figure and ground, body and landscape, and abstraction and representation begin to loosen.

Landscape enters Wallen’s work not as a fixed place but as a condition, porous, mutable, and continually reorganizing. Drawing from memory, lived experience, and the physical sensation of moving through the world, her paintings can at times operate as indirect forms of self-portraiture, embedding personal experience within spaces that remain deliberately unresolved.

Across the work, Wallen constructs images that remain in a state of becoming. Familiar forms become strange, disparate elements coexist without needing to reconcile, and recognition remains provisional. Painting becomes a means of testing how a world can be constructed, how we locate ourselves within it, and how quickly that world can change.