Exhibition Review 2: Melissa Melero: Numu (Paiute)

       The Numu(Paiute) exhibits at Artspace at UNR, which is created by a professional artist Melissa Melero. It is mixed media abstract paintings on canvas inspired by the landscape and Northern Paiute culture in Nevada. The work is about Northern Paiute culture because the artist is Northern Paiute enrolled with the Fallon Paiute-Shoshone Tribe and grew up in Nevada. She is inspired to use various mediums such as oil pastels and watercolors to create her work with photography and mixed media. Featuring a range of media including painting and sculpture, depict the life and culture in Paiute. The primary product of the Paiute people is willows, cattails and pine nuts. The materials of Melissa Melero’s paintings fuse sand, organic objects, acrylic washes and rice papers that describe the Paiute people’ life. She made her painting in a figurative sense in order to rep resent the Paiute culture and nature. 
       The exhibition includes contemporary mixed media paintings of abstract images. Melissa Melero’s work combined objects and images to create her culture as well as beautiful landscapes. The painting was made by an expanded canvas with a thick papers and paste layer. The cycle of life, the four directions, and the petroglyphs form her Northern Paiute Tribe in Nevada. The cycle of life is about the process of the plant, animal, and human being from birth to death which expresses the spatial perspective theory. She believes that the paintings as a personal collaboration of her tribe. Moreover, she added a lot of bright color to the image and abstract images brought different visual impacts to people. The works as Melissa Melero’s contribution to her Paiute culture and he devotes more attention to create some highly textured images to show the history development and her personal life.