Melanie Smith: FordlandiaMilton Keynes Gallery, Milton Keynes, UK
Past gallery exhibitions exhibition
Overview
Installation view, Melanie Smith: Fordlandia, Milton Keynes Gallery, Milton Keynes, United Kingdom, 2014
This exhibition focuses on works made since 1994 that relate to the artist’s own experience of migration; travel, adventure and utopian aspiration combine with disorientation, dislocation and abstraction in the search for a brave new world. The video Spiral City (2002) shot from a helicopter as it circles above the urban sprawl of Mexico City shows an aerial view of the city’s streets and buildings slowly fading to white as the camera spirals higher and higher.
The film Xilitla (2010) features the ‘Garden of Eden’ in the Mexican jungle populated with architectural follies by the British poet turned Surrealist collector, Edward James, between 1949 and 1984. The new film Fordlandia (2014) was shot in the Brazilian Amazon amidst the remains of an aborted city and rubber plantation built in the 1920s by the car manufacturer, Henry Ford.
Alongside these films, a number of large museological vitrines contain hundreds of objects, paintings, photographs, collages and clips that build up an accumulated and evocative material culture, where archaeological remains and personal records mingle with tourist souvenirs as the eager process of excavation and discovery melds into a faded and enigmatic sense of the past.
Curator: Anthony Spira
Installation Views
Installation view, Melanie Smith: Fordlandia, Milton Keynes Gallery, Milton Keynes, United Kingdom, 2014
