DFN Gallery is pleased to present “Trepidations” by Melanie Vote, featuring new oil paintings on panel.  Intimate in scale and painted in great detail with an eye for nuance, Vote culls images from fashion and news magazines combining female figures in somewhat benign settings with odd props and unusual outfits. 

Anxiety seeps out of Vote’s work where gas mask clad women, cupcake bearing bombshells, and devious book smart little girls cavort across interiors and landscapes.  As Vote explains, “my work is an attempt to use straightforward representational painting in order to explore subtle sources of tension.” 

In Girl with Double Headed Hare, an ice skater donning high fashion dress, bubble sunglasses, and a pompadour ponytail shows off her hot pink bloomers while leaning down to cajole her leashed pet – a two headed rabbit.  At once innocent and strange, each implied narrative is riddled with the contradictions that reveal the deceptive underpinnings of our time.  Girl with Cupcakes is more obvious as Vote places an exploding building in the distance behind our hostess, who continues to smile seductively while offering up cakes and posing provocatively.  However, one doesn’t know whether she is the diversion or the culprit.

Melanie Vote received her BFA from Iowa State and her MFA from the New York Academy of Art.  She has won numerous awards included a Pollock Krasner Foundation Grant in 2007, a full fellowship to the Vermont Studio Center, and has exhibited extensively on the East Coast.  This will be her first solo exhibition at DFN Gallery.