Material memory: The work of Melissa Melero-Moose

A visual essay concerning the work of Northern Nevada Paiute painter Melissa Melero-Moose. She creates paintings that participate in abstraction, drawing from patterns that appear in traditional Native basketry and design. She includes physical materials embedded in the paintings, such as willow reeds and pine nuts – materials and sustenance that have been gathered by the Paiute people for thousands of years. Gathering them for her paintings, she travels territory that has been overlaid by boundaries of private or governmental ownership since European settlement. Her work bridges and interweaves notions of landscape and identity, abstraction and tradition, design and memory – as well as representation and materiality.