Melissa M Button is a visual artist and Lecutrer in Painting/Drawing at the Herberger Institute of Art and Design at Arizona State University. Button received her B.S in Architecture from Arizona State University in 1994 and an MFA in Drawing in 2001. Her research has always been rooted in the collaboration of opposing ideas and has revealed unique discoveries whereupon the amalgamation of these oppositions manifested something that is greater and more infinite than the sum of its parts. Early studies in architecture became the foundation for her interest in space and an awareness of constructed realities.  The observation of something as real, is tenuous at best, as the perceptions from which we gather information are so easily coerced. Her recent work not only uses the collaboration of these conceptual ideas, but it also brings together a mix of processes that seeks to blur the boundaries beyond traditional labels.  The final works become both image and object collaborating to continually reinvent the viewer’s observed reality.  Recently, she was awarded the Glenfiddich Artist in Residence in Banffshire, Scotland to pursue 3 months of research during in 2018.   She received 2 project grants that provided funding for collaborative exhibitions in China.  Her work has been published in the Superstition Review, American Artist, and New American Paintings.  She has shown her work in the Micro Museum in Brooklyn, NY, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Fort Collins, CO, Mesa Contemporary Art Museum in Mesa, AZ, and the Bridge Gallery 798 District in Beijing, China among others.