moniquemeloche is pleased to announce its inaugural participation in the Aspen Art Fair, presenting a focused selection of new and recent works by Cheryl Pope, Luke Agada, and Brendan Fernandes. Bringing together painting, drawing, and sculpture, the presentation considers the body and the landscape as both place and metaphor: a site of memory, resilience, and transformation. Set against the dramatic terrain of the Rocky Mountains, the works explore how we inhabit, navigate, and reimagine our environments, both physical and psychological.
Cheryl Pope (b.1980 lives in Chicago/Miami) debuts new fabric paintings from her acclaimed landscape series, following her celebrated solo exhibition ALL THERE IS at Monique Meloche Gallery earlier this year. Known for work addressing language, identity, and systems of power, Pope turns to landscape as a poetic vehicle for exploring grief, healing, and endurance. These atmospheric paintings resist idyllic notions of nature, instead presenting emotionally charged spaces shaped as much by memory as by geography.
Luke Agada (b.1992 Nigeria, lives in Chicago) presents new paintings and drawings that reflect his distinctive visual language, merging portraiture, abstraction, architecture, and symbolism through layered compositions. His surrealist paintings of disembodied figures and dreamlike grounds explore identity, migration, and the transformation of the postmodern human, where time and space produce complex bodies of difference.
Brendan Fernandes (b.1979 Kenya, lives in Chicago) presents new sculptural works. Soft Cover, commissioned by the Fabric Workshop and Museum in conjunction with the Pulitzer Arts Foundation's exhibition on Scott Burton, transforms the language of furniture into an object that resembles polished stone, shifting between support and restraint. In Being, a mahogany headrest evokes rest, ritual, and care while reflecting Fernandes' ongoing investigation of movement, architecture, and the body.
Together, the works by Pope, Agada, and Fernandes offer distinct meditations on the body and its enduring presence. Pope evokes the figure through its absence, allowing landscape to become a repository for memory and emotion. Agada's layered compositions suggest bodies that emerge and recede, existing as traces within shifting architectural and symbolic spaces. Fernandes approaches the body through choreography, where sculpture holds the residue of movement long after the performer has departed.
