Melanie Smith
Melanie Smith, born in Poole, England and living and working in Mexico City since 1989, is an artist whose work has been characterized as a re-reading of the formal and aesthetic categories of avant-garde movements. Recognized nationally and internationally for work intimately related to a certain expanded vision of the notion of modernity - with a particular understanding of what this means in Latin America, especially Mexico - Smith was chosen in 2011 to represent Mexico with Red Square Impossible Pink for the 54th Venice Biennale.
In an interview with Alison Hearst in the exhibition catalogue for México Inside Out: Themes in Art Since 1990, Smith gives a sense of Mexico City and her own development as an artist in a dynamic, if sometimes challenging, time and place, explaining, "It is all these little, hazy, fractured zones and unknowns that we live in here in Mexico that interest me. . . . I see how people live in Europe; I don't know if I'm necessarily interested in that way of living. I think these pockets [of ambiguity] in Mexico City create potentialities." For Tuesday Evenings at the Modern she presents "Melanie Smith. Skewed vision: in and out of Mexico."