Jet-setter Hideaways: The Utopian Propaganda 
Melissa Loop

In Jet-setter Hideaways: The Utopian Propaganda Melissa Loop will explore interpretations of an idealized space. Her paintings reflect on society’s constant search for perfection and how that collides with differing concepts of Utopia. The paintings “act as metaphors for our simulations of natural habitats, social structures and consumerist environments.” By melding imagery from a variety of sources ranging from Dubai to Disneyland, Loop creates fantasy steeped in moral ambiguity that explores the seduction, exploitation, repulsion and complicity of desire.

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The aesthetic terrain of her paintings draw influence from the stylized, hyper-color quality of video games, advertising and Japanese animation, imagine Candy Land after a corporate take over and slick rebranding. Loop describes her use of imagery as an idiosyncratic language, where the “use of patterns, over-lapping forms and dripping paint exploits the flatness of the image and negates any illusion” ensuring her work does not “perpetuate the consumerist fantasy but instead explores its many facets.” Her work uses icons of power and beauty to expose cracks in the artifice of perfection, leaving viewers uneasy about their own complicity in the creation of these ideal contrivances.

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Melissa Loop lives and works in Minneapolis. She received her BFA from the Minneapolis College of Art and Design in 2005. She has exhibited at the Minnesota Artists Exhibition Program at Minneapolis Institute of Arts, was an artist in residence at Art of This, part of a traveling exhibition entitled Sketchbook Project that included showing at the Museum of Contemporary Art in DC and was featured in New American Paintings Magazine.