About Melanie Burnell

Thanks for visiting my Portfolio.

My thoughts on the inspiration for the theme of my exhibition comes from my experiences throughout my highschool years. A “warped reality” is something that I have come in close relations with through the last four years, whether it be from media consumption or the fault of my own brain. In my words a “warped reality” is the idea of a plain of reality that is skewed or abnormal in some ways, whether it be big or small. Something that may appear normal at first glance but with closer examination the abnormalities or unique features stand out. A lot of my exhibition pieces come from my own life experiences, they are vast and uniquely different from each other, which can be represented by the variety of different materials and mediums used throughout the pieces.

The largest example of warped reality portrayed in my work is mental illness, specifically Eating Disorders. My sculptural piece Ana is a found objects sculpture made of several different object components that relate specifically to my complex and difficult relationship with food. Some of these objects include; a scale, diet books, broken cups and silverware, and a tape measure. Anorexia, in this case, is one disordered that can change one’s mind entirely, instead of your brain viewing food as a necessity it instead views food as a privilege. This can have both lasting mental effects, like never viewing food the same way, but also long lasting physical effects like bone damage, emaciation, and liver failure. This is an example of a “warped reality” because of the ways the eating disorder skews your way of thinking and your reality into thinking you can survive without food consumption.

My piece Apocalypse is also an example of a warped reality. This piece was inspired by the announcement of the sequel of an upcoming game based on an apocalyptic scenario. Most of the setting of the game is in a city overrun with nature due to being abandoned. I took a every day photo of a highway landscape with nature overrunning it, making it completely fall apart. The main idea I was trying to convey through this piece was to show the beauty of destruction, and while disasters are well, disastrous, with time beauty will rise through. While the concept is beautiful the scene portrayed in this artwork is not something that exists in reality, or at least, not in a reality that people encounter on a daily basis.

The order of my pieces varies with the themes of the pieces, the first two are created based off of my experience with reality, while the rest vary in terms of reality that I specifically encountered. Due to the COVID virus my class decided that rather than do an in person exhibition we, for the safety of our community create a digital exhibition on a site called crevado.