As chair of the studio arts program at Norwalk Community College in Connecticut, Fucigna is well attuned to the need to be direct. He has cultivated an ability to speak on multiple levels to a variety of audiences. This skill translates into artwork that combines a use of simple and accessible materials with an execution of sophisticated and at times sublime sculptural work.

Working on a much larger scale, a recent work of Melander's required two tons of used clothing. Brought in by forklift and created by a 14-person production team, the monumental installation was commissioned by the fashion brand Diesel for the 2017 Young International Art Fair in Paris. The clothing, which was folded using a special technique developed by Melander through trial and error over many years, was meticulously sorted by color and stacked into a cube-shaped armature. He has executed similar projects for Eileen Fisher and The Chapman Perelman Foundation's Change Fashion initiative; in February, he will create a public sculpture in Hong Kong, commissioned by luxury real-estate developer Swire Properties.

Melander's work was not always so grand. Early in his career, feeling stunted by the theoretical overkill of graduate school, Melander began reading and experimenting with the work of psychoanalyst Carl Jung and his theories on lucid dreaming. He decided to set an intention every night to create a piece of art in his dreams. The experiment eventually led to a body of work involving suitcases that then led to an idea to stack the suitcases on piles of used clothing. For the first two years of this exploration, Mary Help of Christians Church in New York City's East Village passed on unusable donations to the artist.

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