DEMO Project presents two exhibition openings on Friday, March 10 from 6:00 – 8:30 p.m. “Weight of Light,” a group exhibition, and “Succulent Succulent,” a solo project from Melissa Oresky, will run through Thursday, April 6. DEMO Project is open for the duration of the exhibits on Saturday afternoons from 1:00 – 4:00 p.m. or by appointment.

“Weight of Light”
DEMO Project, with its blocked out windows and silenced domesticity, invites an exploration of light and of its absence. “Weight of Light” brings together four artists whose work suggests that light be viewed as inextricable from the material. Their insistence on binding light to substance questions Western pictorial tradition, in which light is used metaphorically and illustratively to indicate the immaterial: clarity, divinity, truth, ephemerality. These works suggest that the interaction of light and substance is specific and complicated—dirty, tactile, thick, solid, or even dark. The works in “Weight of Light” hold and bind light to phenomena in a way that approaches permanence. They treat light as something to catch, follow, filter, reflect, and absorb. Light is contingent on the weight of conditions.

Featured artists are Paola Cabal, Gina Hunt, Vincent Como, and Angelina Gualdoni. “Weight of Light” is curated by Melissa Oresky. The exhibition will close with an artist talk and reception on Thursday, April 6, from 6:00 – 8:00 p.m.

Melissa Oresky: “Succulent Succulent”
“Succulent Succulent,” consisting of video and a corresponding collage, uses the form of an agave plant as structure to contain and transmit information. In DEMO’s small back gallery, a monitor faces an image made primarily of reflective surfaces, providing light to view and animate its surface. The plant’s repeating form opens a conversation between stillness and movement, reflection and absorption, singularity and multiplicity.

In her paintings, collages and videos, Melissa Oresky explores aspects of landscape through an evolving vocabulary rooted in abstraction. Her current work looks to plant form, growth, and life processes as models for moving and still images. Solo exhibitions include K. Imperial Fine Art, San Francisco; The Elmhurst Art Museum, Elmhurst, Illinois; the Hyde Park Art Center, Chicago; and The Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago. Group exhibitions and screenings include TSA New York, Brooklyn; OQBO gallery, Berlin; The Engine Room, Massey University, New Zealand; Proof Gallery, Boston; 65GRAND, Chicago; The Franklin, Chicago; Devening Projects, Chicago; and SCA Contemporary, Albuquerque. She has been a fellow at artist’s residencies including Petrified Forest National Park, Arizona; Schloss Pluschow, Germany; Santa Fe Art Institute, New Mexico; The Thicket, Georgia, and Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, Maine. She was the recipient of a 2005 Illinois Arts Council fellowship. Oresky received her MFA from the University of Illinois at Chicago and BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She currently lives and works in Normal, Illinois where she is an Associate Professor of painting at Illinois State University.

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Tags: Angelina Gualdoni, Demo Projects, Gina Hunt, Melissa Oresky, Paola Cabal, Springfield, Succulent Succulent, Vincent Como, Weight of Light