RECLAIMED VOICE

“Vulnerability is the birthplace of innovation, creativity, and change. To create is to make something that has never existed before. There is nothing more vulnerable than that.” – Brené Brown

Reclaimed Voice, a Curatorial Proposal Series, is an exhibition that explores one artist’s journey to find strength and healing through art. During a 9-month period of intense studio investigations Janella Mele confronted, accepted and worked with personal challenges and feelings. The paintings, drawings, poems, videos, virtual realities and video games she created present a powerful artistic expression about living through trauma. They represent a collection of every emotional realization, every feeling that she shaped into art during that time.

About the Artist

Janella Mele is an installation artist who washed up on Plum Island, Massachusetts in 1989. She makes giant, emotional monsters on a myriad of anything surfaces. Janella transferred from Northern Essex Community College and studied how to art at Tufts/SMFA (BFA 2017), where she received the Melissa Beth Myers award in recognition of academic excellence, personal growth, and the ability to achieve this success while overcoming educational and personal obstacles.

Janella is currently learning to build Virtual Reality worlds through Unity softwhere– repacking her parasite paintings as a skin landscape to 3D animating and programming. She is devoted to help survivors of trauma regain their power through art, and in sharing her story of how making art everyday has supported her own healing process.

Janella will run several workshops dealing with the issues of trauma and recovery.