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Be Right Back, 2026
Mixed-media installation with neon, found and acquired objects, cyanotypes on fabric, pool noodles, plastic tablecloths, acrylic on wood, and mixed-media painting
Home.
I'll be right back.
But will I?
I’ve left traces of myself, do you see them too?
Do you remember it like I do?
Do you see the traces I left of you?
Do you see the laughter, or the tears?
Is it the same? Am I right?
Are my memories true?
Sometimes it gets so fuzzy.
Have I forgotten your voice?
Do you still hear mine?
I still hear your old radio playing jazz.
I still hear you laughing in the kitchen.
I still hear your tap shoes tapping.
I still hear the doves flying.
I still taste the loquats.
It turns out,
I cannot forget, because I am you.
We swirl around together, and now she is us too.
Melissa Uroff is a California-based artist and photographer whose work is deeply rooted in her experience as a woman. She finds joy in working with color and light across installation, photography, and mixed media, and has long been drawn to combining materials in both 2 and three-dimensional work.
As a photographer, Melissa works with alternative, historical, and experimental processes
including cyanotypes, gum bichromate printing, Polaroid transfers, hand-coloring, screen
printing, and traditional darkroom techniques. She often features local community leaders as
subjects, using photography to explore identity, memory, and connection.
Her three-dimensional work incorporates traditional neon lights, artist-made sculpture, and
found objects, often brought together as immersive installations. Melissa is a second-generation neon tube bender who learned the craft under the mentorship of her father. In a field that has traditionally been male dominated, she is drawn to neon as a medium through which she creates space for female-centered representation, using light to tell her stories. Her work is influenced by those who came before her as well as her own lived experiences, she uses light as both a material and a language for personal and collective narratives.
Melissa's two-dimensional work exists somewhere between memory and dream, where the
boundaries between reality and imagination begin to dissolve. Through an intuitive mixed media process, she layers her own photographs with found imagery, collage, paint, ink, resin, and other materials to create works that feel both deeply personal and universally familiar.
Her practice is rooted in storytelling and transformation. Making art is a way of processing,
communicating, and moving through personal hardship, thoughts, and dreams. Her childhood, heritage, and community continually resurface through recurring symbols including flora and fauna, birds, dance, music, found objects, and family histories. Together, these elements create visual narratives where memory, emotion, and imagination intertwine, making it difficult to tell where lived experience ends and dream begins.
@melissauroff