Overview
Melanie Smith

‘I’m interested in the depth of different scales and themes that repeatedly appear, resurge or emerge in distinct ways. Nowadays it feels like there’s a cosmography or compendium of thought processes that are perceivable as my work evolves.’

Melanie Smith’s oeuvre creates an interference of sensibilities that has nothing to do with the mixing of traditions and cultural ancestors. On the contrary, Smith’s exploration of the city’s casual repertoire is the haphazard proximity of two processes of modernisation, a heterogeneous vision that has its origin in two monuments of visual and social secession, in two crisis situations. Melanie Smith combines two different visual concepts and two economies that would normally be seen at opposite ends of a spectrum in her work and yet, share the drift caused by a new general orthodoxy of global capitalism. This fact alone suggests a post-national status quo: it is an aesthetic that emphasises the long-distance interferences of the circuits of contemporary capitalism.

Smith’s paintings, photographs and videos employ the same mobility and ductility as objects put on sale by the market. This example of the contingent nature of contemporary aesthetic compromises led her to practice forms of installations that demonstrate the ephemeral nature of the works within themselves. By arranging paintings to be showed stacked against a wall, for instance, she does not build up the traditional situation of work in a studio, but rather fortifies the fragmentary and always substitutable value of the experiences her work records and produces.

Eschewing any discourse that refers to the value of an irreplaceable totality to the installation, Melanie Smith has started to create a number of sets in which she combines, overlays and arranges her works in various media (paintings, objects and even performance settings) to provoke structures that are therefore taken down and dispersed, since their components are works that can be autonomised, displayed, sold or circulated separately.

Like the city itself, there is no element of the set that is constitutive: several assembled works are put together into a far more complex program than each of its parts, but this addition never ends up being a ‘whole’.
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Selected works
  • Melanie Smith, Fifteen Minutes of Sublime Meditation, 2021
    Fifteen Minutes of Sublime Meditation, 2021
  • Melanie Smith, Psychoactive Render 7, 2021
    Psychoactive Render 7, 2021
  • Melanie Smith, Psychoactive Render 9, 2021
    Psychoactive Render 9, 2021
  • Melanie Smith, Blake – Absent Leading Role Exercise, 2019
    Blake – Absent Leading Role Exercise, 2019
  • Melanie Smith, María Elena, 2018
    María Elena, 2018
  • Melanie Smith, María Elena VIII, 2018
    María Elena VIII, 2018
  • Melanie Smith, María Elena IX, 2018
    María Elena IX, 2018
  • Melanie Smith, Collage 6, 2014
    Collage 6, 2014
  • Melanie Smith, Collage 15, 2014
    Collage 15, 2014
  • Melanie Smith, Collage 17, 2014
    Collage 17, 2014
  • Melanie Smith, Fordlandia, 2014
    Fordlandia, 2014
  • Melanie Smith, Bulto (Package), 2011
    Bulto (Package), 2011
  • Melanie Smith, Jungle, 2010
    Jungle, 2010
  • Melanie Smith, Plaza don Eduardo, 2010
    Plaza don Eduardo, 2010
  • Melanie Smith, Fly, 2010
    Fly, 2010
  • Melanie Smith, Fleur de Iys, 2010
    Fleur de Iys, 2010
  • Melanie Smith, Xilitla, 2010
    Xilitla, 2010
  • Melanie Smith, Aztec Stadium. Malleable Deed, 2010
    Aztec Stadium. Malleable Deed, 2010
  • Melanie Smith, Parallax of Failure (in Four Parts), 2008
    Parallax of Failure (in Four Parts), 2008
  • Melanie Smith, 13 periphery views, 2008
    13 periphery views, 2008
  • Melanie Smith, Urban View - Highway 1, 2007
    Urban View - Highway 1, 2007
  • Melanie Smith, Parres (No 3), 2005
    Parres (No 3), 2005
  • Melanie Smith, Untitled III (Spiral City - Serie 2), 2002
    Untitled III (Spiral City - Serie 2), 2002
  • Melanie Smith, Spiral City, 2002
    Spiral City, 2002
Selected exhibitions
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