Melanie Smith | Six Steps to the Unpredictable

Melanie Smith’s current project is the fourth piece in a series of works that combine different media to address the rupture between fiction and reality. Gallery visitors may remember one of these earlier works that was shown last year, Six Steps to Reality, which paired a large projected image of an immaculate, shifting white space and a smaller television screen showing the behind the scenes, nitty-gritty work that went into producing the set filmed for this projection. Just as that project blended references to painting into video making, the new piece, Six Steps to the Unpredictable, joins photography and video, or still and moving images, to produce unexpected results. 

Six Steps to the Unpredictable documents a performance with a resulting video and 6 black and white photographs to be shown for the first time at Quint Contemporary Art. The video will be a projection and the photos will be presented in a separate space. Like the other works in the Six Steps series, this piece questions the importance of process in the finished work. The video is nearly pushed to the point of abstraction so as to trip up the normal processes of perception. Similar to the genre of science fiction, we are transported to a site almost beyond recognition in order to imagine the experience of looking at reality from outside of it.

Born in Great Britain, Melanie Smith currently resides in Mexico City, where she has been since 1986. She has had solo exhibitions at Galerie Peter Kilchmann in Zurich, Galeria OMR in Mexico City and L’Escaut Gallery in Brussels. She was included in inSITE’97, the IV Biennial of Monterrey, the VIII Havana Biennial and P.S.1’s recent Mexico City: An Exhibition About the Exchange Rates of Bodies and Values that took place in 2002. Rafael Ortega, Ms. Smith’s husband, has collaborated with other contemporary artists, including Mexico City artist Francis Alys, and currently lives and works in Mexico City.