An Exhibition of Works by Mateo Romero and Melissa Talachy
August 17 – November 17, 2006
Artists Mateo Romero (Cochiti Pueblo) and Melissa Talachy (Pojoaque Pueblo) have been invited to do a two-person show this Indian Market at the Poeh Museum. The show is called P-5, a reference to the anthropologic tool of labeling historic Pueblo culture in phases. The current epoch, Pueblo Five means all of the time and culture from the Pueblo Revolt of 1680 to the present. The tag line “the next evolution” talks about the dynamic nature of art and culture even within the framework of mainstream labels.
Melissa’s pots are: sculptural, curvaceous, sensual, warm Mac lipstick colors, incised, mica slipped, juicy. Her forms and surfaces are directly inspired and based in traditional Pueblo pottery, but with a wonderful contemporary emotion.
Mateo Romero’s paintings are mixed media works based on his photography of local Pueblo people and dancers. Paintings run the range from dancers in extreme states of motion to calm, dignified portraits of the people of the Pueblo world. Thick, luscious, heavily applied paint combines with photo-transfer process and rich brown tar glazes to produce strikingly beautiful paint surfaces. The use of over-sized paintings in the Poeh Museum space will further enhance this quality.
Through combining the strengths of Melissa’s three-dimensional pots with Mateo’s two-dimensional paintings, we hope to create a series of ecstatic moments for the viewer to experience. These moments are directly related to Pueblo art, dance, culture, and spirituality. Our goal as artists is to start a discussion within a Pueblo frame of reference, and move it into one of our inter-connectedness and inter-relatedness as human beings.
Mateo Romero (Cochiti Pueblo)
Written in Pojoaque Pueblo, May 1, 2006.
