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Inside in Winter
Amanda Acker, Sally Maca, & Melanie Parke
Kenise Barnes Fine Art, Kent, CT
7 December 2024 - 26 January 2025





THE STILL LIFES
Light is the main character in my work. Or maybe it is air. I walk in twighlight to observe the moon, the stars. In daylight, to watch the sun in the sky and the little things below.

Composing a still life with the obvious identifiers - a bouquet, a bowl of fruit - what I want to give my viewer is a feeling of chasing light. I’m curious how light effects can make a chimera of things - a mutation - as if lifting the weight out of what is knowable.

Cezanne’s idea of passing through objects is something I think about a lot. Even when the entire plane of one of my paintings is engaged in pattern, I’m going for a sense of never-ending transparencies, passing through walls and hard surfaces, to keep the eye going, passing to the other side of a thing. To keep looking.

I reconstruct interiors and garden motifs through ideology and memory. Collecting imagery inspired by serene, untroubled days spent in island cottages and Roman villas, I present material objects that appear close at hand and can be seen and touched in the imagination. Flowers, which represent tenderness, center most of my work. The presence of birds suggests curiosity and wonder, sometimes allegories of fragility, sometimes euphoria. I’m looking for visual lushness. Contemplation. By alternating tonal moods and vivid ornamentation, I aim for discovery within the still life genre, sensations of consolation, longing and desire.