polychrome reviews in the media

..Perhaps most accessible of all the work on display at the arts centre is Lara Melnik's Polychrome.

Melnik, who has showcased her work in smaller galleries and craft shows around the Yukon, takes the opportunity to experiment with different shapes and forms in this exhibit.

Large-petaled electric pink flowers, psychedelic fungi and bright orange and yellow landscapes are like a midwinter shot of espresso for the colour-starved Yukoner...

Vivian Belik - Yukon News

What's Up Yukon Review - Article Link

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-Nicole Bauberger - What's Up Yukon

New exhibit is both quirky and dark

Friday January 22, 2010

By Vivian Belik

Ian Stewart/Yukon News

Artsfront

Chris Reid's Bunny Days is one of three exhibits on display at the Yukon Arts Centre Gallery.

There's a darkness lurking beneath the colourful surfaces of the Yukon Arts Centre's latest exhibit.

From the seven-foot-tall horse that is literally bursting at its seams to a quaint-looking house that has grown chicken legs and is running away, the pieces are deeper than they first appear.

Tucked away in a corner, viewers may not immediately see Veronica Verkley's piece, Seam, but they will notice it as soon as they enter the gallery.

The sharp smell of wet, sheared sheep wool permeates the gallery and leads you to a life-sized horse painstakingly hand sewn from pieces of recycled leather.

The horse is standing on a carpet of dirt and wool and looks as if it has been caught in a rainstorm. Water drips from every surface of the horse and loose threads hang from its neck. Its head droops.

"Sometimes we try to hold everything in and we can't, so we just burst at the seams," said Verkley, referring to the liquids that people release, particularly tears.

The horse was built over several months in a rented hotel room in Dawson City's infamous Westminster Hotel.

Working in a tight space - the horse literally filled the entire room - Verkley wound used hotel bedsheets, mummy-style, around a frame of bent willow.

Aside from being economical, using recycled materials allows people to imagine where these items may have been before they wound up in an art piece.

"They have so many stories, the lipstick smudges, the tools, the hands, the bodies that have rubbed up against them - they all bear marks on them," she said.

It's not the first time Verkley has used recycled materials to create animal forms, a horse made from salvaged scrap metal still stands in the atrium of the Yukon Arts Centre and Verkley is known for the dogs she fashioned entirely from plastic bags found on the outskirts of Dawson.

Verkley invites people to touch, to "let the work get under their skin."

The resulting piece is visceral - visual, aural and tactile - and strikes right at the gut.

The same holds for Manitoba artist Chris Reid. Her Bunny Days also encourages people to get close to her work.

It's not hard to do when there are hundreds of hand-sewn rabbits and cats dangling from the ceiling all begging to be touched.

However, her most interesting work is the intricately painted eggs and large pastel drawings featuring screaming toast, evil cats and houses that have grown chicken legs and are fleeing their owners.

It's silly, but has a serious edge.

Drawing on "baba yaga" stories from her Ukrainian heritage, Reid shows houses that disappear from their owners when they aren't home.

It's a real-life situation Reid knows only too well. She works as a housing co-ordinator for homeless people in Brandon.

"One day your house and everything with it may just disappear," said Reid.

"It makes you realize just how vulnerable we all are."

Much of her work deals with power dynamics.

There are soft, furry, "feminine-like" rabbits being chased by houses, "phallic" planes and giant screaming toast.

But she often turns these power dynamics on their head, showing one of the aggressors under attack in the next drawing.

Her work is too frenetic at times, perhaps reflecting of the fact she considers art a "coping mechanism" for her stressful job.

But her outlandish characters have a way of bringing light to an old topic that most people shut out.

Perhaps most accessible of all the work on display at the arts centre is Lara Melnik's polychrome.

Melnik, who has showcased her work in smaller galleries and craft shows around the Yukon, takes the opportunity to experiment with different shapes and forms in this exhibit.

Large-petalled electric pink flowers, psychedelic fungi and bright orange and yellow landscapes are like a midwinter shot of espresso for the colour-starved Yukoner.

In one corner, Melnik displays a curtain of all the beads she has ever made, inviting people to walk inside and touch them all.

On a small table she has meticulously created about 50 [180] little creatures in an "assent of polymers [polymen]."

The "gang of serious little characters," moves around the multi-level display like parts on an assembly line. The piece is quirky and demands a closer look.

Forever Plus a Day [forever and a day] is a particularly effective landscape of hers using 11 different panels to show the Yukon's vast, changing landscape.

But not all of Melnik's pieces work well with one another.

The Beadology [the kingdom of bead] display, featuring "specimens" of beads pinned into a box each featuring their own Latin name, seems more at place in a funky bead store than a gallery.

Moving into a larger space was a "challenge, but an exciting challenge," said Melnik who spent about a year preparing for the exhibit.

Her thoroughness and organization shows, but her creativity comes out best in the improvised forms she is least used to working with.

The three exhibits run until March 13 at the Yukon Arts Centre.

Lara Melnik will be doing a live demo of her work. Call Jessica at the Yukon Arts Centre for future dates and times, 393-7109

Contact Vivian Belik at

vivianb@yukon-news.com

From the Arts: Multivitamin Colour

February 11th, 2010

By Nicole Bauberger

Lara Melnik, queen of craft fairs and cafés, has created an intricate and colourful show of work in polymer clay at the Yukon Arts Centre Public Art Gallery.
If February seems black and white and grey to you, Polychrome could be the antidote.
The title wall reflects Melnik's well-known status in the community. Her name is given simply as "Lara" with a large-scale flower beside it.
More of these flowers bloom on the show's back wall. These flowers, with petals radiating out from the centres, carry some of the hippy groovy style Melnik uses in her work.
A long, slender horizontal piece underlines the title. A wide variety of colours and textures in small vertical shapes run along the long black rectangle. Above each shape, white dots in a variety of shapes, the form and texture of scotch mints, suggest the heads of many simple figures. They could be the crowd of people at the gallery's opening.
The piece is called i-catching (i-pods). Beside this piece, as with all of them, short, easy to read first-person text recounts how Melnik made or got the idea for each piece.
An installation of legal size cards, six high by seven wide, fills the other side of the title wall. Overall, the piece shades from red at the top though the colour wheel to red again at the bottom. On closer inspection, Untitled lists all the titles of Melnik's thousands of original pieces she's created over the past 10 years, in alphabetical order. It's the ink it's printed in that produces the colour effect.
You could spend a pleasant while, traipsing through these names with your imagination. I had other pieces to turn to, so perhaps Baby Blue Fruit will suffice to intrigue you. Or how about whole lists based on chocolate and cinnamon?
In this piece and in the ramps and boxes in some of the other pieces, I believe that I detect the hand of Darren Holcombe. Lara Melnik's partner in life and art business, Holcombe set aside his engineering career to turn his computer, carpentry and organizational skills to the family art business.
It is a Melnik tradition, for every art opening, to prepare simple polymer clay bead-like pieces to give away to everyone who comes. Many of her fans collect these pieces. This show was no exception. All visitors to the show received a circular colour wheel edged in black, about an inch in diameter.
Some of the pieces will be recognizable in format to those who know Melnik's work. Framed Yukon landscapes, matted in bright colours, cluster on one of the walls.
Then, some take her work and enlarge upon it. Forever and a day is a midsized piece. Melnik has taken a series of her unframed inch-deep landscapes and butted them up against each other, matching at the horizon. The landscapes are depicted in a range of bright colours for mountain and sky. The cumulative effect evokes the variety in the Yukon landscape, how it changes in light and character from day to day.
Two framed pieces, Flora of the Yukon and La Flore du Yukon, use the same strategy: strong green shoots covered with a wide variety of fantastic multi-coloured blooms.
These pieces are fine, but the most interesting for me were the ones where Melnik used her skill with the polymer clay more experimentally.
An assent of polymen will reward long inspection and will delight young and old. Ramps have been built around plinths. At the bottom, a black polymer clay face grows out of a disk of black clay inset with colour buttons around the perimeter. Little whimsical creatures, reminiscent of anime characters, follow one after another up the ramps around the plinths.
It seems to me that Melnik had a wealth of these characters, and so they got to mill around in a group on top of the plinth before rejoining the line to go back into a small black pond, where an orange face is dissolving, the suggestion being that it will re-emerge at the bottom.
Beside this dissolving pond, a face with a spike growing out of its head collects a rainbow of coloured rings.
Is it an allegory of life and death? Perhaps ...
Playing in the rainbow occupies a large plinth. Melnik has artfully arranged a series of disks of polymer clay in a range of colours, printed with textures, gradated from 1/4" to 4" diameters. Over the course of the show she will come in and rearrange the disks to make a new piece. A digital picture frame on the wall above the plinth shuffles through photographs of the disks in various arrangements.
In another piece, the audience is invited to step inside a circular curtained area. The curtain is made of strung beads. Melnik reserves a sample of every cane she's created over the past 10 years of making beads and art. A dated bead separates the months, so you can trace a history of her interests in colour. You can touch these beads, gently.
And finally, possibly my favourite, the kingdom of bead. Melnik has created several cases treating her beads to a Victorian style biological scrutiny of species and variety. Melnik's polymer beads are melted on pins and given playful Latin names. The "lovey bead," for example, is called Amplusamoratum valentines.
The materials are "polymer clay, pins, blood, sweat, and tears."
You can see more about Melnik's art on her website at www.laramelnik.com.
Polychrome continues at the Yukon Arts Centre Public Art Gallery until March 13.

-Nicole Bauberger