Melissa Marks

“Melissa Marks’s character Volitia is a unique form of narrative abstraction. An ambiguous personality, invested with agency and humanism, she is a sort of alternate self that Melissa has willed into being. Despite being an abstraction, Volitia moves through time and space in a series of imagined settings and circumstances that are depicted in non-linguistic visual sequences. Unbound by a body, Volitia can be whatever she wants to be—both nothing and everything.”

Melissa Marks: Volitia Turns Herself Inside Out in Order to See the World
Lisa Panzera, essay published in conjunction with the exhibition, Shirley Fiterman Art Center, BMCC Gallery, NY

“There is a spot you can stand in relation to any Volitia drawing, somewhere not too close but also not too far, in which you can almost, but never quite, pinpoint her remaking as she transforms from leftover dot, from having heard about nothing and of no one, to Superhero. It’s the moment in the cartoon with the stars and the tornado and the exclamation point and the cymbals crashing and the sky imploding when the ordinary goes to chaos in order to become the extraordinary.”

Meeting Volitia
Victoria Loustalot, essay published in conjunction with the exhibition Volitia Returns, Planthouse Gallery, NY

"The dramatic narratives that are being performed in Melissa’s artworks are built upon these dualities. Her pictorial references trace back through the same exact cultural histories as the architectural spaces she is working with. From the Renaissance in Europe through the exportation of Enlightenment Philosophy into the Americas. America’s post-war cultural dominance developed through Abstract Expressionism and Pop Art, specifically, and to whatever present state we are living in now! Melissa’s Drawings engage these histories through oppositions and reflections. In Double Self Split she is entering the void, not with stillness, but through action and speed. The black and white drawing remains incomplete, waiting to be colored. Her Floor Drawing will be the size of a European fresco but will remain a cartoon, made of ink not plaster. Complete in its state of Incompletion."

In anticipation of "Double Self Split"
Stuart Elster, artist, April 2016

"She (Marks) draws a fine line between abstraction and figuration, never transgressing the territory of one or the other. The drawings are in panels, the edges being the edge of the paper, a corner where the plane of one wall meets another. It’s a ‘drop down’ panorama, an unfolded landscape, an expanded, sometimes exploded, fragmented floribunda of life form… Before we were warm, the movement aggressive, broad sweeps of colour crash through purple-crimson garnets casting explosive gravity defying splinters to the sky. Then next we are before frozen water, still reflection and the soft yellow light of dawn."

What I see when I look at the work of Melissa Marks
Simon Beckmann, co-founder of Joya: arte + ecología, March 2011

"The psychic movement in and out of the paradisiacal experience is the subtext of Adventures of Volitia: Expulsion from Paradise, the current installation in Bloomberg SPACE by New York based artist Melissa Marks. Marks has chosen the Expulsion story as the organising narrative for the latest adventures of Volitia, an invented female character and alter-ego who has been the central protagonist of the artist’s work since the early 1990s. The name Volitia comes from the word volition or “the act of making a choice or decision.” Volitia’s actions are not determined by some larger power but through her own choice and desires.
(…) At the very centre of a long colour drawing, Volitia, now surrounded by a creeping blue ice formation at left and an elaborately embellished, orange tree on the right, does a double take. She spins to the left and to the right, unsure of which direction to travel. It is a cartoonish, funny moment, like the whirling Tasmanian Devil. It is also the installation’s punctum, or its core. For Volitia, life outside of Paradise is more interesting, despite its uncertainties and contradictions."

Ripe
Susan Fisher, COMMA11, BloombergSPACE, London, November 2009

"Melissa Marks’s character Volitia cavorts through her drawings with the impudence of Nabokov’s Lolita and the sly pleasure of a cherub. Volitia’s domain is an ethereal realm of voluptuous light. That she is continuously exploding in an amorphous cloud of color punctuates her urgency in a way both hilarious and heartbreaking. Marks’s tongue-in-cheek visual play makes it hard to tell who’s the buffoon, Volitia for being so damned funny under such stress, or her audience for never quite being able to find her. Cherubs and Nabokov aside, we could be in a comic book world of popping balloon captions, or the sophisticated one of Pop art."

Artists On Artists - Melissa Marks
Betsy Sussler, BOMB Magazine, New York City