← Back to Events

The Flood - Solo Exhibition by Melissa Haviland

📆  October 3, 2025 📍 Main Gallery, First Floor 💰 Free open to ages: All

Main Gallery Exhibition
October 3rd - November 26th, 2025

Opening Reception
October 3rd from 5-8pm

Gallery Hours after Opening
Wednesdays-Fridays 9am - 5pm
Saturdays 11am - 3pm

Melissa Haviland’s The Flood draws on the long history of “bluing,” a process in which blue dyes were added to paper and textiles to counteract yellowing which improved perceived quality of the material. From 15th-century European paper made from worn rags to the more modern blue-tinted laundry brighteners, bluing has long suggested improvement, and value—even when it only disguised what may lay beneath.

In The Flood, Haviland reimagines this history through the lens of climate disaster. The towering, immersive installations evoke the sensation of being swept away, as if the ocean had flooded through the space. This work embodies both the chaos of everyday stresses, bedtimes, deadlines; and the immense weight of global crises: climate refugees, rising seas, water scarcity, and environmental collapse. The blue in The Flood echoes the promise of enhancement, even as we are submerged in questions of survival: how do we stay afloat?

Greenville Center for Creative Arts affirms the importance of artistic freedom and the power of creative expression — including work that may provoke, challenge, or confront. This exhibition contains content that some viewers may find unsettling or emotionally intense. Viewer discretion is advised for all ages.

Melissa Haviland's Website

Artist Information

Melissa Haviland

Biography
Melissa Haviland is a printmaking-based installation artist who lives and works in Athen, Ohio. Haviland’s works have shown in 30+ solo exhibitions over 20 years. Currently she is producing work for solo exhibitions at the Mesa Contemporary Arts Museum and the Greenville Center for Creative Arts. Haviland has received 4 Ohio Arts Council Individual Excellence Awards (2009, 2015, 2019, 2025) since establishing herself in Ohio. Haviland has participated in artist residencies at Pyramid Atlantic Art Center (2021), the Lloyd Library and Museum (2020), Kriti Gallery in Varanasi, India (2014), Ucross Foundation (2012), and Anderson Ranch Arts Center (2011). Haviland regularly receives internal project grants from Ohio University to fund her artmaking, research, and the fieldwork necessary to her practice. Her work is directly influenced by research and travels to archives, factories, mines, etc. in India, the United Kingdom, Europe, and the United States. She received her BFA from Illinois State University and MFA from the University of Nebraska–Lincoln, and currently serves as professor of printmaking and papermaking at Ohio University, where she also chairs the print area and directs study for the Honors Tutorial College Studio Art program.


Artist Statement
I am an installation artist that obsesses in multiples, using them to fill space and surround the viewer. I push the medium of printmaking—pulling the prints from the wall and indulging in repetition and pattern. I am drawn to the concept of the multiple to reference the reiteration of objects and ideas in our culture. My current artwork correlates water with emotions, reveling in blue, a color that is at once melancholy and calming. It is inspired by ideas of being swept away by the sea of life, as if the ocean just flooded through your home and swept it away. It considers the feelings of chaos that enters our daily lives combined with larger cultural issues of climate change. How do we manage all this?

Instagram