The Young Team x CMAA
What defines true luxury? It’s more than beautiful surroundings—it’s the ability to curate a life filled with meaning, depth, and inspiration.
In an exclusive partnership with The Young Team Luxury Realtors, Casey Monda Art Advisory brings a rotating selection of premier local, regional, and national artwork into The Young Team’s Moreland Hills office—offering clients and visitors an immersive, gallery-like atmosphere. It’s an invitation to pause, reflect, and connect with exceptional pieces that elevate a space and a life.
This collaboration reflects CMAA’s mission: to connect art lovers with artwork that transforms their spaces into their stories.
In the current exhibition, Casey Monda Art Advisory is pleased to present the painting practice of Mel Rea. Mel began her artistic career as a ceramicist creating large figurative pieces with intricate details. A chance encounter with a bucket of beeswax in her grandparents’ basement sparked her curiosity about the potential of other media. Having worked in ceramics for 17 years, Mel was ready to take on a new challenge and began exploring how she might bring her years of experience in sculpture to a painting practice. Thus began her brief but torrid love affair with encaustic (a wax-based painting medium). While the soft satin finish of the beeswax initially lured her and replaced her love for clay glazes, she eventually wanted to be able to move more freely, intuitively, and spontaneously across the canvas. She began dabbling in acrylic, pastel, gouache, and oil sticks and she has never looked back.
Having fully abandoned the referential details that characterized her figurative sculptures of her early career, Mel’s current painting practice embraces abstract assemblages of colorful lines, shapes, splashes, drips, sprays, and scrapes. The resultant forms may suggest something concrete; but, that narrative would only be in the viewer’s mind. It is precisely this intuitive reaction that initiates the relationship with the painting that Mel desires. As evocative forms dance and weave themselves across the canvas, so too do stories, narratives, emotions, or reactions emerge. It is precisely this back and forth that vitalizes Mel’s work. While she is careful to channel warmth and connection into her compositions, she recognizes that anyone can bring any experience to a work. Once she has made her mark, she yields control to the eye of the beholder. The give and take of meaning-making between the artist and the viewer sets up a dynamic relationship that allows for infinitely open-ended interpretation.
Mel Rea completed her BFA in Ceramics at Kent State University. She currently lives and works in Cleveland Heights.
For more information on the work of Mel Rea and how to purchase a painting in the exhibition, please email casey@caseymondaartadvisory.com
