Propeller Member Since 2022
Melissa Patel is a Toronto-based artist working primarily in drawing, painting, textiles, and photography. She is of Portuguese and Indian descent and her multicultural background has been a key influence in her work in exploring themes of family, identity, memory, heritage, and her relationship to nature and the environment. She views her work as a means to interpret and understand the world around her by breaking down real-world elements and recapturing them through artistic media. She studied at OCAD University and has a BFA in Drawing and Painting. She currently exhibits her work in galleries across Toronto.
“My artwork explores concepts of escapism through the creation of ‘dream-spaces’ and collective memory. The dream-spaces I create blur the lines between realistic representation and abstraction to create imagery that is both representative of the natural physical world and our emotional sense of the world. Collective memory is the memory of a group of people, passed down from one generation to the next. Both are a diluted combination of thoughts, feelings, and events that are not an accurate account of reality, but rather a sentimental, idealized version of reality. I take this distorted account of reality and further reimagine it in my own mind, creating my own fabricated memory or story represented through art. I am interested in exploring the relationship between dreams and memory and how both these things inform my view of the world.”
– Melissa Patel
