Marfa Invitational
May 5 - 8, 2022
Booth No. 10
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Fernanda Mello

The Valley is pleased to present new works by Fernanda Mello at the Marfa Invitational in Marfa, TX, taking place from May 5-8, 2022.

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In her work, Mello explores concepts of origin and interconnectivity, meditating on ecological cycles of life and death while she meticulously paints shapes that can be read as cellular organisms, celestial orbs, chains of beads, pearls, or shells. With constantly changing shapes, colors, temperatures, waves and tides, these meditative geometries reflect ancestral values in a process of decolonization of the subconscious, and hold space as symbols of protection of indigenous traditions and ecological systems. 

Mello has been continuously inspired by her upbringing in Brazil and by “The Falling Sky: Words of a Yanomami Shaman,” a book which recounts the life story and cosmo-ecological thought of Davi Kopenawa, a shaman and spokesman for the Yanomami people of the Amazon region. For her solo presentation in Marfa, Mello created thirty-two new works from her Earth Constellations series and Image Skin series- two explorations of form driven by a desire to bring the viewer a sense of collectivity and connection to spirit. 

Earth Constellations, depicting interlocking chains of pearls or “cells of humanity,” is a series of meditative paintings that Mello intends to allude to the Yanomami prophecy of the end of the world which says that if the last shaman dies the sky will fall, and that will be the end of our planet. Mello creates these paintings as a metaphor for protection, a net-like structure that holds the sky, willing the indigenous tradition to not disappear with the interference of colonization and western culture. 

Mello has also created a monumental series of twenty-seven new Image Skin paintings which will be displayed together in a grid formation. This series depicts the power of transfiguration and transformation held by the shaman in Yanomami culture. When a shaman works with healing, he invokes the powers of nature to assist him through dance and singing, calling in the spirits of the forest, the spirit animals, the spirit ancestors, and the spirit of plants to lend their voices and share their messages. Mello’s Image Skin series represents the many voices that the shaman listens to through his ritual of becoming other with the forces and intelligences of the natural world. Each painting depicts a different voice that the shaman listens to and incorporates during the ritual. Mello states, “The voices are infinite... I painted twenty-seven, but they are infinite.”

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Fernanda Mello (b.1988, Cacoal, Rondônia, Brazil) is an internationally recognized self-taught artist who lives and works in Newburgh, New York. Her upbringing in the Amazon region of Brazil began a deeply personal search as an artist to share her enthusiasm for indigenous narratives that are highly sophisticated and interconnected with every aspect of life in the natural world.