Artist Statement:

We are raised in a context that mythologizes the individual. The scientist, inventor, artist, who, working alone, discovers and creates. And we also know this is not the whole story. We work together, in communities, cohorts and collaborations, learning and growing together. Even when we engage in introspection and investigate our own relationships with ourselves we often do it in group settings.

Debra Olin and Rachel Mello have been making work, separately, in the same artist building for two decades. Each has her own studio, and works alone, behind closed doors. But while visiting each other in their respective spaces, Mello and Olin were struck by how they were both using the human structure as a springboard to larger questions. In this exhibition they seek to bring these “Bodies of Work” together in conversation.

Olin is interested in making connections between disparate cultures. Using the Yiddish language, literature, and folklore as a springboard, she finds commonalities between Eastern European Jews, Ancient Egyptians and Chinese Healers. In this work, her "Cosmic Inclusion" series she uses the figure as a conduit, with energy passing through from heaven to earth and threading through from culture to culture. The figure, an adaptation from the acupuncture chart, is used as a universal symbol of (wo)mankind.

Mello is energized by the connection between the elements found in our bodies and that found in nebulae so far from us in distance and time that it is impossible to conceive. She is interested in understanding our home in this vast infinity of space, and at the same time, how we live and make a home inside our bodies. In her “Living in the Dreaming Body” series she creates shadow box vignettes of copper wire, paper, cut-silhouettes, and painted cosmic scenes, whimsically bridging the infinite and the infinitesimal.

These works of Rachel Mello and Debra Olin explore a measure of living in the body, their own bodies and our collective body, together in the world.

Bio:

Debra Olin is a printmaker, living and working in Somerville, MA. She received her MFA from Massachusetts College of Art in 1980. Olin has shown in exhibitions across the U.S., Canada, France, Poland, Serbia, South Africa, Vietnam and Cuba. Her work is in the permanent collections of the Boston Public Library, Temple Israel, Brookline, MA, YIVO Institute, NYC, The DeCordova Museum, Lincoln, MA, The Harvard Art Museum and the DaNang Museum of Fine Arts, Vietnam. In 2004 Debra was awarded the Rappaport Prize, the largest public annual award to an individual artist in New England. In 2018 and 2022, Olin received a Massachusetts Cultural Council Finalist Award and a grant from the Berkshire Taconic Artist Resource Trust.

Rachel Mello works across a variety of media exploring shape and form and their relationship to the painted or collaged surface. She received her MFA in Theater Arts from Brandeis University, and her BFA and Bachelor of Architecture from Rhode Island School of Design. Mello has worked as a mural painter, as a scenic artist, and continues in private practice as a color consultant for commercial and residential design. She merges these backgrounds in her fine art combining reclaimed materials, and traditional oil painting techniques, woodworking, metal working, and sewing. In 2011 Mello completed a residency at  Ucross Foundation in Wyoming, and in 2015 one at Vermont Studio Center. She received Somerville Arts Council Fellowship Grants in 2007, 2011, and 2013, and was a Massachusetts Cultural Council finalist in painting in 2010. Her work was selected for projection on the walls of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, during "America Remixed," the gala opening of their Art in the Americas wing.  Mello lives and works in Somerville, MA.

Press Release