The mixed-media, figurative paintings and projects of Los Angeles artist Melissa Trochez trace troves of unbridled creative activity directed by visual narrative. Trochez cuts and pastes imagery into each work’s melting-pot like environment, where stories and culture simmer around the artist’s own journey and milieu that purposefully threads their way through each picture. Trochez’s work is rooted within the craft of visual storytelling that include various movements, genres and art forms such as Mexican muralism, religious painting and children’s book illustration. In this lineage of sanctified spaces, Trochez’s works are conceived as inclusive sites of investigation mining our personal and collective memory as they transform trial and tribulation through acts of creation.

Trochez’s imaginative and vivid portrayals of her contemporary daily life are enacted through the various rites of passages of her works’ main protagonists that appear in culturally-rich modes of representation as they battle, solicit for forgiveness or earn mile-marking wisdom. Trochez’s exploratory process undulates between pictorial movement (done by developing different collaging techniques) and dynamic collisions between elements, graphic styles and surfaces, all of which cohere its many symbolic spaces. Trochez’s paintings often grapple with the questions: How did I get here? and Where am I going? Hers is an inclusive tale, made instantly accessible as it bursts with collaged imagery and cultural signage dually acting as a place of refuge out of which bustles the muted sounds of the everyday.

– Pranay Reddy