Melanie Smith with Rafael Ortega: Parres Trilogy

New Works Gallery

MAC & MAM March, 6 June 29, 2008

Melanie Smith was born in Poole, England, in 1965, but left her native country for Mexico City two decades ago. Life in this metropolis has had a direct and profound effect on her work, which reflects the tensions and contradictions of a paradigmatic city. Her work explores not only the city’s overabundance of observable information, but also the social, historic, and economic contexts that have shaped its appearance. Trained as a painter, Smith has kept one eye fixed on the equivocal legacy of Modernism, particularly abstract painting, which she aims to subvert by extending its limits into public space.

The works of the Parres series have occupied the artist since 2004 and include painting, video, photography, and a book project. As part of this series, Smith developed the films of the Parres Trilogy (2004–2005) with Rafael Ortega as the cinematographer. Shot in 35mm in the small town of Parres on the outskirts of Mexico City, these investigate ways of seeing and vision’s obstruction, each capturing a scene that is either hidden or uncovered over the course of the film. Discussing these short films, the artist has noted the traditional status of painting as a window looking onto a pictorial world. The monochrome screen that appears in various ways in the Parres films, she says, “has become more like a barrier, through which we may not want to see, but through which, on the other side, there is a grim reality.”

Using cinema’s fundamental units—a single take the length of a roll of film, one camera, and no editing—the works of the Parres Trilogy unfold in real time. The inclusion of the film leader marks the beginning and end of the physicality of the material, pointing to the construction and breakdown of its conventional illusion. Smith has observed that “in general terms in this project I’m dealing with some kind of erasure—that is, erasure of the modernist monochrome as we recognize it, and, in turn, erasure of a certain type of landscape painting.”

Smith’s reactions to the realities of modern Mexico, on the one hand, and to abstract form in general, on the other, are linked intrinsically to the diversity of her practice and her interest in displacing any kind of aesthetic purity or resolution. She explores the processes and spaces between and across mediums as a means of achieving layered effects and expressing the strains and frictions of a fractured urban situation. Together, the works in this exhibition distill and crystallize the artist’s concerns with exploring a “less defined trajectory, in which abstract work, and painting in particular, relates to contingency, the urban environment, and everyday materials and objects.”

Parres Trilogy, 2004-2005. Video Installation. Courtesy of the artists.

Parres Trilogy, 2004-2005. Video Installation. Courtesy of the artists.

Major support for this exhibition is provided by the Cisneros Fontanals Art Foundation in partnership with Porsche Cars North America. Melanie Smith with Rafael Ortega: Parres Trilogy at MAC & MAM is organized by the Miami Art Museum and curated by Adjunct Curator Rina Carvajal as part of New Work, a series of projects by leading contemporary artists.