‘Embrace Color’ says MOWA Exhibition Artist

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Photo via MOWA - wisconsinart.org

Melissa Scherrer Paré- MOWA

Melissa Scherrer Paré and her work

If you’ve been in any Milwaukee-area thrift stores in the past year and have seen a woman buying large quantities of donated glass vases—the kind in which Mother’s Day bouquets and other floral gifts usually arrive—you may have seen an artist at work.

Melissa Scherrer Paré is a Bay View-based multidisciplinary artist who does everything from painting on silk that is to be viewed or worn to creating sculptures built around the aforementioned vases and made of brightly painted paper pulp culled from old grocery receipts, medical bills, paper scraps and even kids’ homework that has been shredded, emulsified and molded into a work of art.

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Photo via MOWA - wisconsinart.org

MOWA DTN

MOWA's Downtown Milwaukee exhibit space with Saint Kate

Some of Paré’s most colorful, compelling work went on display June 6 as part of “Natural Selection”, a new exhibit mounted by the Museum of Wisconsin Art at MOWA / DTN, the West Bend museum’s downtown Milwaukee gallery inside Saint Kate – The Arts Hotel. The exhibit, featuring 24 of the artist’s works, runs through August 31and is free and open to the public.

Paré, who originally attended the Milwaukee High School of the Arts to study theater, quickly switched to visual arts. That ultimately led her to earning a BFA from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee and an MFA in Photography from the University of Illinois-Chicago.

Making Old New Again

“Theater wasn’t right for me, and it turned out that art was the only thing that I was both good at and interested in,” says Paré, whose childhood bedroom door was always covered in her drawings and illustrations. The idea of molding discarded paper pulp around water vessels, including bottles, canteens and vases, came about from watching a video and doing simple crafts at home.

“It seemed like an inventive way of making something old new again,” the artist says. “I’m not necessarily an environmentalist, but I like the idea of not having to buy a lot of additional stuff, and it didn’t hurt that I wasn’t adding a lot of (effluvia) to the environment.”

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Photo via MOWA - wisconsinart.org

'Reds' by Melissa Scherrer Paré - Detail

Detail of 'Reds' by Melissa Scherrer Paré

Vivid colors dominate Paré’s work, from the paper pulp sculptured vessels to the silk paintings, which she describes as a lot like working with watercolors. The special dyes flow together or are blocked with soy wax in a basic batik technique on Japanese haboti silk, which creates outlines that she sometimes lets stand as part of the design. The paintings, in fact, exhibit a mature style that’s at once both fanciful and sophisticated, semi-abstract botanicals that flow and grow in depth and dimension.

The show is divided evenly into both genres of Paré’s work, but she says two paintings stand out because of the new directions she’s taking in her approach.

“The painting Cycle is new,” the artist says. “It’s special to me because I took another step forward. After boiling the soy wax off I painted the white lines that remained, which added more color to it.”

Dramatic Contrast

In the painting Deep Seas Paré went to a black background, a color she almost never uses. But this time she let it go and once again painted the outlines, which gave it a vivid, almost dramatic contrast, making another step forward in her technique and added greater dimension to the cacophony of colors represented.

So what is or should be the audience’s takeaway from the exhibit? “Embrace color,” Paré exclaims. “It’s a colorful show, hot and intense, and viewers should be excited about having more color around them, both in their houses and in their world.”

Melissa Scherrer Paré’s ‘Natural Selection’ is on display through August 31 at MOWA / DTN, the Museum of Wisconsin Art’s downtown Milwaukee gallery in Saint Kate-The Arts Hotel, 139 E. Kilbourn, Milwaukee.