Watercolor Exhibit, “Pose” Opens This Month at Fisher’s O’Keefe Ross Gallery

October 4, 2024

A new exhibit at the Patricia O’Keefe Ross Gallery at St. John Fisher University explores coming-of-age in a digital culture through the vibrancy of watercolor and ink wash paintings.

Two of Melissa Wilkinson's paintings, Roll and Kick.

The exhibit, “Pose,” features new watercolors by artist Melissa Wilkinson, who also serves as an assistant professor of practice-art at Fisher. Her work will be on display from Tuesday, Oct. 15 through Thursday, Dec. 5, at the Patricia O’Keefe Ross Gallery, located in the Joseph S. Skalny Welcome Center on Fisher’s campus. An opening reception for the exhibit will take place from 4:30 to 6 p.m. on Wednesday, Nov. 13. Gallery hours are Monday through Friday, 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. It is free and open to the public.

Wilkinson’s work sources images from the Hollywood golden era, evoking the late 70s-early 80s aesthetic of tomboys and heartthrobs, disco, and private Tumblr accounts. She said her work challenges the concept of gender by creating a type of “reassembled painting” that combines the masculine and feminine expressions and “proposing the absurdity of traditional presentations as both limited and binary.”

“I paint these images in order to create a coveted object, one that holds hours of considerate and loving application through a painterly meditation,” she explained. “Influenced heavily by collage and digital intervention, I create meticulous watercolor and ink wash paintings in order to investigate what it means to labor on an object in the 21st century.”

Wilkinson earned a bachelor’s of fine arts in painting from Western Illinois University in 2002 and a master’s of fine arts in painting from Southern Illinois University in 2006. Her work has been featured in wide reaching publications throughout the country including three editions of New American Paintings, The Curator’s Salon, and The Manifest Drawing Annual four times. She has shown in galleries nationally and internationally including South Korea, Canada, India, and Art Basel Miami, and has won numerous awards throughout her career. Her work can also be found amongst private collections throughout the country and abroad. In addition, Wilkinson has earned several fellowships and grants including the Arkansas Arts Council Fellowship in Painting in 2012, a Middle East Studies Grant to create an image archive in Israel in 2016, and a National Women in the Arts Grant to do the same at the Smithsonian in 2019. She is represented by OnCenter Gallery in Provincetown, Massachusetts and splits her time between studios in upstate New York and the lower Hudson Valley in Warwick.

In addition to her work as an artist, Wilkinson has served as an academic, teaching at various institutions throughout the country for more than 20 years. She has conducted workshops at the Arkansas Art Center, Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Fine Arts Work Center, and the Anderson Ranch Center.  She joined the Fisher faculty in 2024 and also serves as manager for the Patricia O’Keefe Ross Gallery.