Melissa Dean

Melissa creates installations and other artworks based on her relationship and interpretation of consumerism in the United States. She seems to be especially fascinated by how certain objects are advertised as being just right for every different person and that we must have it, although they are mass produced. She uses Target and Ikea catalogs to find images to use in her artwork. She sometimes traces the outline of the images and will create stencils to cut out and make distinct shapes to be overlapped or create installations. She has also had people circle every object they would like to buy if they could in a catalog and then compiled the outlines to create an abstract form. The more things the person circled the more distinct their shape would be. The shapes would be formed from crazy frenetic lines overlapping each other. In her stenciled images Melissa often used busy wallpaper prints to give the sense that the consumer products were overwhelming and "too much". Her guilt in being a consumer and buying too much stuff shows in her work through her artistic choices such as the use of the same colored wallpaper on the shape of many different objects. Melissa describes herself as neurotic when creating her artwork and is fascinated by how focused people are when they go shopping and how much physical objects mean to people.