Nina Meledandri
I am a painter, a photographer and a mixed media artist living in Crown Heights, Brooklyn NY. After graduating from Hampshire College, I returned to NY as a freelance photographer and was published by the NY Times Magazine, Architectural Digest, New York Magazine and the Village Voice among other editorial outlets. After a number of years, I taught myself oil painting and began developing language as an abstract painter. I have shown extensively throughout the NY area and was represented by the David Findlay Gallery in NY.
The cornerstone of my process both as a painter and a photographer is daily practice. As a painter it takes the form of daily watercolors that I have been making since 1996. As a photographer I have posted to a minimum of 3 blogs each day for the past 20 years. I show regularly throughout the NY area in group shows and since 2016 I have had 3 solo shows in the community; at Gridspace on Rogers Ave, at the Central Library, Grand Army Plaza and at FiveMyles Plus/Space on St. Johns.
In 2013, I began focusing on projects utilizing both paintings and photographs as raw material. Often this resulted in the creation of diptychs but it also led back to an earlier studio practice of mixed media. This in turn brought me to papermaking and in January 2022, I began a new daily practice making paper, resulting in the project: "The Alchemy of Paper".
Every artist has a desire to make something never before seen, to connect to truth in a unique way, to create the undeniable. At the core of my process, whether as a painter, a photographer or a papermaker, is Jungian philosophy and its explorations of synchronicity and the collective unconscious; it's fostered my AbEx approach to painting, informed the experiential in my photographs and fueled trust in the exploration of materials.
My primary intent, regardless of media, is to provide the viewer access to an interior, recognizable place, be it a reminder of the familiar or the discovery of the previously unknown. To this end my language relies on that which is primal to all humans, forms which exist in the natural world we share. As a painter this often means symbols: eggs, pods, spirals, as a photographer I intimately explore flowers in all stages and with paper making I incorporate resonant organic matter into the paper itself. Weaving though all my work is a love of color and its ability to evoke powerful and emotive responses in the viewer.