Artist brings world

In the wake of the COVID pandemic, artist Melissa Ichiuji found herself drawn to nature and community. Having exhibited her work globally, the Front Royal-based creator felt compelled to focus her attention much more locally.

To that end, she’ll debut the Melissa Ichiuji Studio Gallery on the corner of Main and Cloud streets with an open house from 11 a.m. to 6 p.m. Saturday. Ichiuji will be on-site during the event to discuss her work, some of which is for mature audiences, she said. After the open house, the gallery will be open from 11 a.m. to 6 p.m. on Fridays and Saturdays and by appointment only.

"Once the pandemic hit, I was very invested in focusing my attention on how I can bring art to the community," she said. A town resident for about 20 years, Ichiuji's efforts to promote the local art scene are apparent throughout downtown. She painted the 26 indigenous flowers that adorn the Afton Inn project on the corner of Main Street and Royal Avenue and was active in developing the town's mural series as well as the pole banners that promote local dining, shopping, and activities in Front Royal and Warren County.

"It's all an effort to bring more awareness of art, maybe to inspire others to initiate art projects and to involve the community and to activate the spaces in a more creative way. Ultimately it's to bring more awareness to Front Royal, to bring more tourism, and to support the economy," she said.

The opening of her gallery takes that mission a step further and will offer a taste of Ichiuji's bold, playful, and powerful sculptures and paintings. Her work, which has been exhibited in museums and galleries in Paris, Brussels, Munich, Berlin, New York City, and Washington, D.C., is full of metaphors and sexual puns and explores themes of transcendence, psychological tension, and metamorphosis.

"This first opening is a survey of my work from about 2012 until the present time, so there's a variety of different materials, different subject matter, and so you’ll get a good sense of the trajectory of my studio practice," said Ichiuji, noting that her art studio is located in the back of the building.

"I’m kind of known primarily for working with textiles. A lot of my work is reminiscent of dolls. In the past I would primarily show my work out of the area and overseas so this was a good opportunity, because I’m in the community, to go ahead and share my work and let folks know what I’m up to," she said. Ichiuji works with a wide variety of materials, including welded steel, ceramics, textiles, found objects, and oil paint. "Not everything is for sale, that's not really the point. It's really an extension of my studio. It's not so much an opportunity to sell the work as it is to share the work," she said.

On one wall, the gallery will display work from a 2012 exhibition called Fair Game. Large textile caricatures bring to life mostly political figures from that time, including the Obamas, the Romneys, Newt Gingrich, and Paul Ryan. Hung to mimic trophy heads, the soft sculptures reflect various scandals or interests of the subjects, created from a variety of items such as pantyhose, men's suits, found objects, and women's lingerie.

Ichiuji's steelwork will also be on display. After learning to weld in the early 2000s through a class at Northern Virginia Community College, Ichiuji has played with the medium in a variety of ways over the years. Her stunning "Goddess of the Burning House" sculpture stands about 12 feet tall with three heads and six arms, holding a burning house in each hand. The sculpture is a nod to Kali, the Hindu goddess of destruction, who is also often associated with motherly love and creation. The work is an example of the juxtaposition that Ichiuji loves to explore in her work.

"I’m interested in exploring the vacillation between the sense of strength and empowerment and a sense of vulnerability which might be distinctly a feminine experience," she said, noting that she's drawn to contrasting lightness with more serious content relating to the frailty of the human condition, coming of age, and awakenings.

Lately, she's been creating steel flower sculptures.

"For me, working with steel and flowers is really, in a way, a metaphor for preserving something that's naturally ephemeral. It's an exploration of mortality in general. A lot of the flowers are captured at their peak and, in a sense, they’re eternal because they’re made of steel," Ichiuji said. "There's also something about the juxtaposition between a very feminine, traditional representation with a typically masculine modality of creating, which I like. It's sort of bringing an industrial quality to something that's very delicate and I like that energy of forcing something that's resistant, like metal, into something more fluid and yielding."

Contrasting with the strong, fragile-looking flowers are the sculptures’ exposed roots, which are perhaps a reference to the jagged underworld or the damaged planet. "Maybe it's resilient in spite of the way it's uprooted," Ichiuji mused. "It still juggles the dark and the light, the yin and yang that I feel in my work."

A graduate of the Duke Ellington School of the Arts and the Corcoran School of the Arts and Design, Ichiuji was a professional dancer with an interest in art from a very early age.

"I started making dolls when I was 6 years old, on the heels of a house fire. My family barely escaped. The house burned to the ground. It was a miracle we even got out. We lost everything," recalled Ichiuji. With her family suddenly dependent on the community, Ichiuji began collecting fabric, buttons, and knickknacks.

"Because I’d lost all my toys, I just started making things. I think, on a deeper level, it was just a way to process what had happened. None of this was premeditated. It was a natural inclination toward processing emotion through the making of things. And that just kind of stuck," she said, noting that she had been exposed to creativity by her artistic parents and her Appalachian grandmother who made quilts.

Raised in Northern Virginia, Ichiuji discovered Front Royal in the early 2000s. After falling in love with a historical house, she moved to the town with her family and later purchased the former Ramsey's Hardware store building, which now houses her studio and gallery.

"That was one of my favorite places, both my husband and I because we were renovating our house and we were hardware store junkies. You never knew what you’d find. It was like a time capsule," Ichiuji said. "I’m excited to be able to take the building, restore it and reinvent it to bring it new life and reimagine what it could be."

With exhibits planned for later in the year in Paris and Miami, Ichiuji plans to offer classes and lectures at the Front Royal studio sometime in the future. "I just want to share my work and create dialogue," she said.

For more information on Ichiuji's work, visit www.melissaichiuji.com.

Contact Laura Ruby at [email protected] .

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