Melissa Mote Glosup (b. 1988, Austin, Texas) is an artist based in Chattanooga, Tennessee. Working primarily in painting and drawing, her work explores themes of hidden realms, mirror worlds, memory, voyeurism, and our personal relationship to objects and the landscape.
Using meditation as a portal to the work, her paintings weave the material world with a world just beyond. Her work draws on remembered moments: a fiery orange sun sinking over a hazy ridge, curtains billowing in front of an open window as a thunderstorm approaches, a midnight cigarette smoked in bed. The exterior landscape often bleeds into the interior as rooms are taken over by lush greenery. Her paintings commonly depict subjects in their most intimate spaces, surrounded by their personal talismans. Strange use of perspective and the frequent inclusion of mirrors allude to a slightly off-kilter parallel universe. She creates the world she wants to inhabit.
Obsessively visual and indebted to art history, painting serves as her way to conversate with and reinterpret the historical canon of painting. Her paintings are characterized by meticulous detail, flat swaths of bold color, the use of universal symbology, and the subtle perversion of the natural world. She earned her BFA in 2011 from The Cooper Union. Melissa has spent the last ten years as a public librarian.