Pink Flamingos, Melanie MacDonald, from the Florida Noir series, 2017

Melanie MacDonald’s Florida Noir series is comprised of many exquisitely painted works that evoke a multiplicity of responses, such as Pink Flamingos. When we spoke about these paintings, literary references peppered our conversation. MacDonald cited Douglas Coupland (who sometimes fancies himself an artist, and some fancy as a cultural prognosticator): “Florida isn’t so much a place where one goes to reinvent oneself, as it is a place where one goes if one no longer wished to be found.” I found myself ‘speaking’ that ‘Florida is going to dissolve into madness and alligators and toxic waste’, channeling Neil Gaiman’s American Gods. MacDonald paints trinkets of the utopian dream too often projected onto Florida (as in the desperate film noir Midnight Cowboy: “It’s not, not bad, huh? There’s no heat here, but you know, by the time winter comes, I’ll be in Florida.”). In her Florida Noir series, the kitschy, almost disposable trinkets so often dismissed as touristy ‘trash’ become interesting and contested motifs for memory, or even how ‘landscape’ (with all the history and myths in that genre, real or imagined) can be encapsulated in an oft – dismissed gauche ‘souvenir’ or mundane bit of porcelain. You can see more of her work here, and read more about her practice here. ~ Bart Gazzola