Revolving Cycle
Mel Watkin

GALLERY II

August 3 – September 1, 2024

Opening reception: Saturday, August 3, from 6–8pm

A.I.R. Gallery is pleased to announce Revolving Cycle, a large-scale drawing installation of a falling tree by artist Mel Watkin.      

Watkin’s recent works explore the dichotomous forces of nature, from its staggering beauty to its extreme dangers. Recently, her rural area in southern Illinois lost over three-thousand trees in a Derecho thunderstorm, leaving massive visual and environmental scars. The straight-line winds in this storm sustained 106 mph. Seeing so many fallen and shredded trees, Watkin worked to capture some of their majestic beauty and sheer size through drawing. Watkin uses historic drawing methods, such as the cross-hatched rendering used by illustrators and engravers dating back to the Renaissance, to create shadows and develop three-dimensional volume. By replicating the grand scale of a fallen tree, Watkin gestures toward a peculiar phenomenon: though trees can loom sixty feet above us, we often don’t notice their size until they fall and crush our cars and homes. But her installation also infuses a devastating situation with hope, as the tree appears to come back to life through drawing. 

The largest piece in this series, entitled Revolving Cycle, consists of twenty-three separate sheets of paper and measures forty-four feet in length. After lightly gridding the painted paper with chalk lines to resemble graph paper, Watkin sketched out circular shapes cycling through the seasons of the year—winter, spring, summer, and fall. The finished work, created primarily in pencil and rich in detail, fills the entire gallery, surrounding viewers with a sense of seasonal transformation and renewal.  

Mel Watkin’s work has been shown nationally with solo exhibitions at Franklin Furnace Archives, New York, Hyde Park Art Center, Chicago, Laumeier Sculpture Park, St. Louis, and the Addison/Ripley Gallery, Washington, D.C. Recent group exhibitions include the American University Museum of Art, Washington, D.C., the Grand Rapids Art Museum, Michigan and Longue Vue House and Garden, New Orleans. In 2023, the Hyde Park Art Center in Chicago exhibited three commissioned map-based works and Southern Illinois Healthcare Cancer Institute commissioned eight small works on graph paper.  Watkin’s work is in the collections of the Saint Louis Art Museum, the Illinois State Museum, Spencer Museum of Art, University of Kansas at Lawrence, the Book Art Collection of the Museum of Modern Art, New York, and the Franklin Furnace Archives, among other venues. In 2010, she was among 9 artists selected to create a permanent public artwork with Franz Mayer Glassworks of Munich, Germany for the “C” Concourse at Lambert St. Louis International Airport. Grant awards include a 2001 and 2022 Illinois Arts Council Fellowship, a Critical Mass grant, a Pollock-Krasner Foundation Fellowship, and a Pyramid Atlantic artist’s book award. Watkin has completed a number of residencies including the Ucross Foundation in Wyoming, Ragdale Foundation, Lake Forest, Illinois, and Palazzo Rinaldi, Noepoli, Italy. 

View the Press Release here.

Photography: Matthew Sherman