Leonardo da Vinci’s "Mona Lisa," Johannes Vermeer’s "Girl with a Pearl Earring" and Caravaggio’s "Medusa" stare out among 40 headshot views of 40 subjects of famous paintings in “There’s a price on your head.” Sausages, fish and slabs of beef and pork lifted from 17th-century Dutch still-life paintings cover “You’re Dead” and moss grows over a classic oval painting of women in a "Lady Lichen" series. Those paintings are — to use the title of Melissa Furness’ Kiechel Fine Arts exhibition, “Historical Rubbish" — elements that typify her conceptual approach to painting that recontextualizes imagery from art history by throwing them into piles.
Melissa Furness' "There's a price on your head" combines 40 subjects from famous paintings. That process of turning the images into “rubbish” identifies the meat, bread, clothing and generic body forms as the cliches that they are and, simultaneously, eliminates the preciousness of the historically revered artwork and degrades the Western ideal of art. Furness, a University of Colorado Denver professor who teaches painting and drawing, also uses her work to examine the imagery’s historical and cultural context, writing in her artist’s statement: “Each series of work that I have produced is related through an exploration of distortions of history.
The work calls into question selections of what it is that is upheld or kept and cherished versus what is discarded or thrown out and unwanted. These elements t.