ECHOES
Yashar Gallery
Yashar Gallery by Brooklyn Art Studios is pleased to present a group exhibition curated by Hayley Ferber.
05/30/2025 – 06/08/2025
Echoes features eleven female-identifying artists based in Greenpoint whose works explore the evolving nature of identity through time, memory, cultural heritage, and connection to the natural world. Across media including textile, collage, painting, printmaking, and sculpture, themes of selfhood, domestic life, and environmental interconnection emerge through layered textures and vibrant palettes. Together, these works trace the subtle imprints that shape who we are and how we come to understand ourselves within the world around us.
Ann Cofta, Emily Garfield, Diana Haro, Jessica Krause Smith, Loretta Lomanto, Kelly Olshan, Mel Reese, Carla E. Reyes, Laura Schneider, Janine Sopp, Mary Younkin
Group Exhibition curated by Hayley Ferber
May 30 – June 8, 2025
Opening Reception Friday, May 30, 6-8pm
Yashar Gallery
276 Greenpoint Ave, Brooklyn, NY 11222
Two Person Exhibition
Warnes Contemporary x Affordable Art Fair NYC
At this year’s Affordable Art Fair, the Warnes Contemporary booth will present a dynamic dialogue between the works of Mel Reese and Mayowa Nwadike, two compelling voices in contemporary art.
Reese, a Brooklyn-based observational painter, uses formalism to create compositions where lines, shapes, and textures echo symbolic formalism, balancing abstraction and the familiar. Her work complements that of Nwadike, a self-taught Nigerian artist based in Manhattan, whose mixed media pieces combine realism with abstraction to explore African stories and symbolism. While stylistically distinct, both artists use symbolism to delve into identity, memory, and cultural resonance. Reese’s work reflects universal structures and processes, while Nwadike connects tradition with contemporary expression.
Together, their works create a rich visual and thematic conversation, inviting viewers to explore the intersections of personal and cultural storytelling.
New York - Spring
19 - 23 March 2025
Affordable Art Fair New York will return to the Metropolitan Pavilion in March 2025, showcasing original contemporary artworks ranging between $100 to $12,000. Welcoming local, national and international exhibitors, our spectacular Spring edition will be sure to put a spring in your step!
Delta Daydreams
Warnes Contemporary
Warnes Contemporary is excited to present its first-ever exhibition, Delta Daydreams, a selection of work by the formalist painter, Mel Reese.
In her paintings, Reese utilizes an array of water-based media such as acrylic paint, Caran D’Ache, and water-soluble oil pastels. Lines, shapes, colors, and textures are as central to her work as is the process of creating them. Moving between abstract elements and familiar structures allows the paintings to echo the representational through symbolic formalism.
09/22/23 – 10/22/23
Solo Exhibition by Mel Reese
September 22 – October 22, 2023
Opening Reception Friday, September 22, 2023, 6-8pm
Warnes Contemporary Gallery
183 Lorraine St, Fl 2
Brooklyn, NY 11231
This Delta Daydreams series explores the time Reese spent in the Mississippi Delta while in residency at JX Farms. A time spent surrounded by a dark, haunting nature, seemingly suspended in time, and drenched in water inspired an investigation of body and landscape.
A delta is defined by its relationship with water. Water, therefore, plays a major role in the production of this series; each painting begins with a complete saturation of the canvas with water. Layers of puddled water allows pigment to simultaneously pool and flow––only partly manipulated––across the surface of the canvas. For this reason, water embraces a contradictory existence and becomes a symbol of freedom and control, nourishment and destruction all in one.
Manipulation of each material creates a variety of textures and explores expression through color, line, and form–generating familiar senses of topographical expressions that place the viewer somewhere and nowhere all at once, like a daydream. The paradoxical vertical orientation of each painting is disorienting and distorts our understanding of ‘scape’. Colors evoke a sense of haunting timelessness; exploring an environment mysteriously suspended in time.
Reese’s observations are a particular confluence of quiet distilled down forms and bold textures that, when thoughtfully constructed, the paintings become narrative. A tale of the battle between progress and destruction, her work explores the complex dichotomy between the human experience and our crumbling world.
When We Cease to Understand the World
Yashar Gallery
Yashar Gallery by Brooklyn Art Studios is pleased to present a solo exhibition of paintings by Mel Reese.
Reese is a Brooklyn-based observational painter inspired by formalism. A complex layering of abstract elements allows her work to echo the representational through symbolic formalism. Her work focuses on the increasingly tethered connection between bodily autonomy and the global climate crisis.
08/24/23 – 09/13/23
Solo Exhibition by Mel Reese
August 24 – September 13, 2023
Opening Reception Thursday, August 24, 2023, 6-8pm
Yashar Gallery
276 Greenpoint Ave, Brooklyn, NY 11222
The title of this exhibition is a nod to the brilliant novel of the same name by Benjamín Labatut–a hauntingly beautiful collection of stories about our society’s most brilliant minds and the simultaneous ingenuity and horrors their discoveries brought upon us. A tale of the battle between “progress and destruction”, Reese’s work similarly explores the complex dichotomy between the human experience and our crumbling world.
Embracing the body as the vessel and nature as the foundation of human existence, Reese seeks to generate conversations of sustainable choice through the lens of bodily autonomy and landscape.
Utilizing her entirely unique painting through mono-printing process, Reese’s observations are a particular confluence of quiet distilled down forms and loud symbolic patterning that, when thoughtfully constructed, her paintings become narrative. Her paintings tell a tale, through quiet desperation, of how the more we take, the less we seem to have.
