Amelia Mendelsohn is an educator and artist based in Michigan, where she teaches courses in painting and drawing at Hope College. She received her BA in Studio Art and Art History from Sweet Briar College and her MFA in Painting and Drawing from the University of Notre Dame. She has taught as an Instructor of Record at the University of Notre Dame and as an Assistant Professor of Art Instruction at Hope College. Her work has been exhibited in various museums and galleries, including the South Bend Museum of Art, the Kalamazoo Institute of Art, FKM Gallery, and the De Pree Art Center & Gallery. Her paintings are part of the permanent collection at the South Bend Museum of Art, and in 2025 she was awarded the Harry D. Forsyth Fellowship at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts.
"My work explores everyday domestic scenes culled from archival family photos. These photos are remnants of memories that, when translated to canvas, reveal destructive family structures hidden within everyday familiarity. I am concerned with familial conflict existing within mundane domestic scenes, especially when social mores and value systems bury traumatic experiences within the home. Efforts to conceal and repress these events imbue everyday scenes with foreboding unease. Patterns of insidious and abusive familial relationships may manifest both physically and mentally. This dynamic causes family conflict to become an inheritance, allowing gender roles and normative values to echo across generations.
I am informed by feminist reinterpretations of the uncanny as it operates within domestic environments. Art historians and theorists such as Alexandra Kokoli apply an understanding of the feminist uncanny to the domestic sphere within visual art, due to its ability to make the site of the home feel strange. My work draws from this feminist reinterpretation of the uncanny due to my interest in visualizing family dynamics within the domestic sphere. I am particularly interested in revealing subtle, but destructive, gender roles and emotional labor within the home. In my paintings the uncanny exists in spaces that oscillate between a familiar and unfamiliar domestic environment, tapping into psychological unease through a return of repressed familial memory. Saturated colors cast familiar interior scenes in an unnatural light, allowing a sense of disquiet to seep into the paintings. Different levels of articulation and abstraction mimic the distortion of memory associated with traumatic experience."
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