Melanie Smith
Sicardi Gallery is pleased to announce Abandoned Bodies and Uncertain Futures, the second solo exhibition for Melanie Smith at Sicardi Gallery. An opening reception with the artist is scheduled for Friday, November 4th, 6-8pm.
Abandoned Bodies and Uncertain Futures is an exhibition of new work by Melanie Smith that explores forms as collective bodies. The series of new paintings and video transform and recompose images, taken primarily from Internet or stock photos, into what Smith calls a visual essay of misaligned elements. Smith notes, "For me, this is the first time where painting becomes like the film frame, the edited chopped up narrative. The paintings are abstracted representations of our present and possible future conditions of being; the body in these paintings is an empty body, cut off, truncated and devoid of capacity to be touched or moved. The indifferent body, a collective, uniformed body is without soul.” Smith’s video Cats, addresses the Internet darlings and their posted antics, “so stunningly vacuous and unfathomably popular that they suck up our collective slag.”
A QR code will be a part of the exhibition, placed on the wall with Smith’s paintings, allowing the spectator to download the new Cats video by the artist, interacting with the Internet while passing through the exhibition in the Sicardi Gallery Project Room.
Melanie Smith, born in Poole, England, received a Bachelor of Arts degree from the University of Reading, where she studied painting. In 1989, she moved to Mexico City, joining an international community of artists and writers. She continues to live and work there today. Important museum exhibitions of her work include Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam, The Netherlands; the Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston; the Milton Keynes Gallery in Buckinghamshire, UK; Museo Amparo, Puebla, Mexico and the MIT List Visual Arts Center, Cambridge, MA. Melanie Smith represented Mexico in the 54th International Venice Biennale, Venice, Italy in 2011. Her paintings are included in many prominent public and private institutions including the Tate Modern, London, England; The Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY; the Tamayo Museum, Mexico City, Mexico and the Jumex Collection, Mexico City, Mexico.
