NADA MIAMI 2025

Melanie Delach: Altars

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“My doe, my dear, my darling, tell me what all the sighing is about” - Florence + the Machine

Feia is proud to present Altars, the debut solo exhibition of new and recent works by Melanie Delach at NADA Miami 2025. Delach’s emotionally charged mixed-media practice explores the complexities of identity, grief, embodiment, and transformation through a uniquely textural and atmospheric visual language. Altars features a series of intimately scaled paintings and works on paper that extend Delach’s ongoing investigation into placelessness, queer interiority, and ritualized memory. 

Rooted in her background as both a painter and educator, Delach’s work combines drawing, sculpture, and painting to form what she calls “thin places” — meditative, surreal spaces where figures emerge in shadow or remain barely legible, often subsumed by botanical growth or geometric framing. These environments function not as literal landscapes but as emotional terrains, interiors of the self shaped by experience, loss, and quiet resilience.

Delach’s compositions are deliberately ungrounded — floating between presence and absence, memory and projection. Influenced by devotional iconography, grief, and the domestic rituals of care, these pieces question how we hold space for ourselves and each other during times of rupture and reformation. Using a deeply tactile process, Delach builds her surfaces through repeated cycles of sanding, staining, building, and mark-making, creating works that feel simultaneously eroded and preserved. The resulting pieces carry a sense of accumulated time, echoing reliquaries or weathered altars.

As a queer artist navigating spiritual inheritance and bodily vulnerability, Delach constructs visual spaces that honor slowness, ambiguity, and transformation that allow her works to offer moments of lush introspection and quiet confrontation. Presented by Feia, whose mission centers the voices of emerging artists exploring hybrid practices and underrepresented narratives, Altars positions Delach as a compelling voice in contemporary figuration and material abstraction, inviting viewers to engage with the emotional landscapes of becoming, offering a visual language for healing, softness, and survival.