NADA — Miami 2024

Baker—Hall is pleased to present a two-person exhibition featuring Miami-based artists, painter Melissa Wallen, and textile artist Alissa Alfonso.

Through their distinctive practices, both artists offer a deeply evocative exploration of memory, nature, and the human connection to place. Through painting and soft sculpture, Wallen and Alfonso invite viewers to traverse spaces where the boundaries between the personal and the universal, the real and the imagined, are fluid and ever-shifting.

Melissa Wallen’s paintings draw from a rich tapestry of personal snapshots, poetry, music, and art history, forming abstract landscapes that navigate the boundaries between memory and reality through the fluid nature of oil paint. Her work interweaves fragmented elements, creating spaces that are both familiar and otherworldly. Gesture and hue act as guideposts through emotional landscapes. Her intuitive paint handling, characterized by loose, swirling brushstrokes and a conscious embrace of the canvas surface, echoes the Romantic and Mannerist traditions. Fog, mist, and light mingle within her works, forming expansive dreamscapes that invite viewers to step into brilliantly lit nightscapes or traverse the astral plane.

Alissa Alfonso’s textile sculptures turn to the natural world to examine our relationship with abundance, waste, and preservation. In her series Nature’s Medicine, Alfonso repurposes discarded fabrics and found objects to create soft sculptures that embody the essence of medicinal plants and botanicals. Her use of upcycled materials—gathered from beach cleanups and repurposed plastic items like beach balls, as well as hand-dyed fabrics—highlights the fragility of nature while celebrating its resilience.

This presentation explores the intersections of memory, emotion, and nature—spaces that are as much about personal reflection as they are about our collective relationship with the world around us