Melanie SmithShort Circuit

Melanie Smith, born in Poole, Great Britain, in 1965, lives today in Mexico City. In her installations, paintings, video works and objects she addresses a broad spectrum of questions of perception, above all with regard to socially and philosophically relevant subjects. She left audiences deeply impressed with her contribution to the 2011 Biennale in Venice, which she took up again in considerably expanded form in her first institutional solo presentation in Germany, at the Villa Merkel in Esslingen in the summer of 2012. On the specially and elegantly appointed ground floor of the neoclassical villa, for instance, she showed the video work “Xilitla,” which takes as its subject “Las Pozas de Xilitla,” the sculpture park laid out in the tropical rainforest of Mexico by the English artist Edward James in the middle of the twentieth century – a lush landscape full of biomorphic architecture and concrete sculptures. And when men then carry body-sized mirrors into the picture, the scene appears reinterpreted as something surreal, for the mirror images interlock with cinematic moments of movement and thus emphasise the dreamlike elements of a found “symbiosis of architecture and landscape”; at the same time a mental bridge is built to the placing of mirrors out of doors as we know it, for example, from the American Land Art pioneer Robert Smithson. In addition, Melanie Smith presents us with a painting of surfaces and processual states in which, at the threshold of the representational, the facticity of a purely pictorial reality appears to oscillate; picture by picture, one imagines oneself always at the beginning of something new.

Exhibition:
Villa Merkel Städtische Galerie Esslingen, 22/4 – 24/6/2012