Melanie Smith (artist)

Biography

Melanie Smith was born in 1965 in Poole, England. She studied painting at the University of Reading and she developed a post-minimalist aesthetics, and received her Bachelor of Arts. Since 1989 she has lived and worked in Mexico City, an experience that has enormously influenced her works ever since. “1989, she moved to Mexico City, joining an international community of artists and writers there. Her work was included in the first exhibition of installation art in Mexico, curated by Guillermo Santamarina at the Museum of the Ex-Convento de los Leones.” From then on, the city played an important role in her performances and art works. In Mexico City, she experimented with installations, videos, films, photographs, and paintings with redoing and retouching to her endless imaginary world. Smith’s works have the tension between chaos, and order forms of violence within the industrial society, and the economy.

Works

Her earlier pieces considered Mexico City itself, recording its multitudes, its violence, its banality, and its clandestine nature and at the same time its inherent decomposition. The most outstanding piece from this cycle is the video Spiral City (2002). In another of her works, she broadens the notions of place and non-place by documenting the small town of Parres on the outskirts of the city. She produced a trilogy of 35mm films and a series of paintings and installations that rework the modernist idea of the monochromatic.

For her 2002 film, Spiral City, Smith rented a helicopter to fly over east of Mexico City. Her film is based on an abstract grid of the city following the movements of a helicopter flying in widening spirals. Her videos and films are made in collaboration with cinematographer Rafael Ortega and also include a series of paintings and photographs. Smith’s work engages directly with the city from above.

Even from a great height and even as its configurations dissolve in the light there is no end to this city; this is saturated urbanism, drained of colour, no monuments, no green spaces, no river. The starting point was Ixtapalapa, a very poor, satellite city of endless identical streets of low-rise houses.

Spiral City alienates the world below, the world that is known, and abstracts it from the lens of a helicopter. This video draws attention to various image patterns and abstractions that would normally be invisible to the naked eye. According to The Guardian, this film is meant to be “a testament to a city that is subject to a crystalline-like erosion, whereby structures build upon each other and collapse, as well as being a haunting cartography of the future.” What Smith means by this is that the city is continuously being built upon; because of this constant building there is too much chaos, which in turn causes a collapse. Since this cycle is repeated, she argues, it is a map for what the future will hold.

Another work of Smith’s, Orange Lush (1995), is a series of several installations of objects on boards. These installations contained “bright orange plastic objects, among them life-preservers, extension cords, buoys, cheerleader’s pom-poms, water-wings, flip-flops, light bulbs, balloons, and water rafts.” Although the objects seem to be placed randomly, their placement is actually well thought out. There are slight contrasts between rounded objects and objects that are deflated and flattened. This, argues art historian Amanda Boetzkes, is meant to convey “a broader stalemate between sensorial plenitude and economic exhaustion.” Orange Lush performs an aesthetic critique of Mexico’s consumerist economy and the overflowing need for “stuff”. Smith chose the chemical orange color because to her it always screamed “for sale”, which was fitting for the statement she is making about Mexican consumerism. Also, Boetzkes says the color orange “marked the invasion of Mexico City with cheap commodities in the 1990s, after inflation and bailouts from the United States and the Bank for International Settlements caused a devaluation of the peso.” This event describes the exhaustion of economics that Smith tries to bring into her Orange Lush piece. Orange is commonly known as the color of fake value and meaningless products. This is something that Smith calls “chemically induced enthusiasm,” which means it is fabricated happiness or excitement—it is not reality. This is what global consumption is; there is momentary gratification and then it means nothing.

Lastly, one of Smith’s big collaborative performance pieces is Aztec Stadium (2010), done with 3,000 secondary school students, and the whole process was filmed. Smith also partnered with Rafael Ortega on this project. Each student had a tile, which, once held up, created large mosaics based on the history of Mexico. Some examples of the images used were “Malevich’s Red Square, as well as from Mexican nationalist imaginaries and even from the popular imaginaries of mass culture, such as the mythical wrestler Santo, wearer of the silver mask.” This process was experimental because the outcome was not always known. As the process went on, students had difficulty following instructions, causing the images to become. There were waves of chaos and control throughout the whole piece, which ended up becoming a large part of the piece. This tension between chaos and order also reflects the how Mexico City functions and how the economy reflects that.

Smith contaminates abstraction through chaos and order throughout three major works, Orange Lush, Spiral City, and Malleable Deed at Aztec Stadium. Orange Lush focuses on ascribing a bright orange color to objects that have been commercialized, thrown out, and have no value, in order to abstract them and create new forms. Spiral City alienates the world below and abstracts the world through the lens of a helicopter.The film, Malleable Deed, at Aztec Stadium shows how the chaos of thousands of people can quickly work together to show a system of order. All three works prove that Smith can work through chaos and abstract different mediums to create a system of order.

Exhibitions

Her work has been exhibited at numerous institutions, both nationally and internationally, including: PS1, New York; MoMA, New York, UCLA Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; ICA, Boston; Tate Liverpool; Tate Modern, London; South London Gallery, London; Lima Art Museum; Tamayo Contemporary Art Museum, Contemporary Art University Museum and El Eco Experimental Museum, Mexico City; and Monterrey Museum, among others. Her individual exhibitions include: "Parres," Tate Britain (2006); "Six steps to reality," Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego; "Parres," Miami Art Museum, and "Spiral city and other artificial pleasures," a retrospective exhibition that traveled from the University Museum of Science and the Arts (MUCA) in Mexico City to The Lab at Belmar, in Denver (2008) and the MIT List in Boston (2009). She represented Mexico at the 2011 Venice Biennale. She has produced two artist's books: Spiral city and other vicarious pleasures (2006) and Parres (2008).