Melanie Smith: Short Circuit

An archaeology of the modern

Melanie Smith, born in 1965 in Poole, Great Britain, now lives in Mexico City. With her installations, paintings, video works and objects, she deals with a broad spectrum of perceptual issues, in particular socially and philosophically relevant themes. She left a strong impression on the public with her 2011 appearance at the Venice Biennale, which she took up again in her first institutional solo presentation in Germany in summer 2012 at the Villa Merkel in Esslingen in a significantly expanded form. For example, she showed the video work "Xilitla", which thematises the sculpture park "Las Pozas de Xilitla" created by the English artist Edward James in Mexico's tropical rainforest in the middle of the 20th century - a lush landscape full of biomorphic architecture and concrete sculptures. When men carry body-sized mirrors into the picture, the scenery even appears to be reinterpreted as surreal, as the mirror images intertwine with filmic moments of movement and thus emphasise the dreamlike elements of a found "architecture and landscape symbiosis"; at the same time, a bridge is built with the mirror settings outdoors, as we know them from the American land art pioneer Robert Smithson, for example. In addition, Melanie Smith presents us with a painting of surfaces and processual states, where the factuality of purely pictorial pictorial reality seems to oscillate on the border of the representational; picture by picture, one always imagines oneself to be at the beginning of something new.

Exhibition:
Villa Merkel Municipal Gallery Esslingen, 22/4 - 24/6/2012