For Immediate Release
August 19th, 2026
Melissa Vogley Woods | When the Earth Bends we Bend
Brandt Gallery is delighted to present, When the Earth Bends we Bend, a new collection by multidisciplinary artist Melissa Vogley Woods. Within the rumblings of the earth, time is held; in a severed rock or a cut away hill, we see layers of events, compression, and time. We see faults and breaks, and the mending and fusion of opposites. The earth's patterning seems still, a memento of time, fixed and legible, the record of a single moment set down and left behind. But this stillness is a kind of illusion. The rock is not outside time but held within it, as we are, caught in the same ever-churning existence that the earth keeps.
Within this exhibition Melissa Vogley Woods is curious about states of permanence, impermanence, what endures and what can be lost. The earth does not experience loss the way we do, it transforms. Can recreation of these lost patterns be a rebirth? Can an impression hold and mirror the original? What is found and lost in translation of a form? It is we who mourn, who reach for what has already dissolved into something else. This exhibition asks whether that reaching, however futile, is itself a kind of devotion, and what that devotion says about our true relationship to the ground we dwell and will return to.
In When the Earth Bends Vogley Woods recreates free standing Knot shaped sculptures that interpret marble from antiquity to the modern era; patterns that have in one way or another, become lost to us. These works are interpretations of marble patterns that have gone "extinct." On the walls are installed a series of intimate panels of fantastical made up marbles, not of the earth's making, but of a dream of the earth, their patterns threaded through with a wandering line that occasionally ties itself into a very human made knot, a hold in time. A series of watercolors are responses to the solid opaqueness of the world below our feet, here one pattern overlaps erases and layers upon another with traces, light and airy. And a set of figurative low-relief sculptures that use repetition to explore human time.
Vogley Woods is interested in these works as threshold objects, they teeter, conflating the body and the earth. They speak of the human hand as the holder and finder, but also a creator and dreamer. They are unreal, yet they are viscerally rock-like, they are mineral, but not stone. The material is scagliola (scah-lee-ola), invented in the baroque era, the process and material has the ability to hold an uncanny likeness to the marble it imitates. Rooted in the baroque impulse to hover between admiration and excess, between realism and the uncanny, the work aims to leave the viewer puzzled, a little in awe, uncertain of what they are seeing. In that confusion she hopes to open a sense of wonder and a recognition of the value that time and the earth grant us. In creating this body of work Vogley Woods asks what does it mean to reconstruct the vanished? Can recovery be an act of hope? The scale of the knots is bodily, weighted with our effort of holding on to what the earth has already let go because we are nostalgic, but the earth is not.
Melissa Vogley Woods is a visual artist, teacher, and artist-curator born and residing in Columbus, Ohio. As a multi-generational caregiver of 30+ years, her practice is aligned with her life as a way to delve into the intricacies of care within relationships with a specific focus on barriers and how we bridge them. Her metaphorical work spans between public art, social practice, and intimate exploration of the object. Recent recognition she has received includes a National USA Fellowship nomination, two Ohio Art Council Individual Artist Grants, and A Greater Columbus Arts Council Individual Artist grant, and she has exhibited locally, nationally, and internationally in institutions such as Columbus Museum of Art, Museum of Sisters Aslamazyan in Armenia, and Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions. She has attended Mass MoCA, Vermont Studio Center, and Wassaic Projects Residencies and her work has been written about in the Brooklyn Rail amongst other publications.
When the Earth Bends we Bend is on view during gallery hours, Wednesday to Friday 11am-5pm, Saturday to Sunday from 1-5pm, and by private appointment. There will be an opportunity to meet the artist from 5-7:30pm on Friday, September 11th. A virtual catalog will also be available. Private appointments and virtual catalogs can be requested by emailing brgalleries@gmail.com or calling 614.223.1655.