Melanie Smith

  • October 29, 2013 7:00 PM

Melanie Smith, artist featured in México Inside Out: Themes in Art Since 1990

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.”

 

This popular series of lectures and presentations by artists, architects, historians, and critics is free and open to the public each Tuesday from September 10 through November 19. Lectures begin at 7 pm in the Museum’s auditorium. Seating begins at 6:30 pm and is limited to 250; a live broadcast of the presentations is shown in Café Modern for any additional guests. Free admission tickets (limit two) are available at the Modern’s information desk beginning at 5 pm on the day of the lecture. The Museum galleries remain open until 7 pm on Tuesday evenings during the series.

Café Modern serves cocktails, salads, and appetizers, as well as a fine dining menu, on Tuesday nights during the lecture series. Enjoy the Café Modern experience before or after the lecture; seating is available from 5 pm to 8:30 pm. For reservations, call 817.840.2157 or click here.

Melanie Smith
Aztec Stadium. Malleable Deed, 2010 
Full high-definition video
10 minutes, 29 seconds
In collaboration with Rafael Ortega
Courtesy the artists, Galerie Peter Kilchmann,
Zurich, and Galeria Nara Roesler, São Paulo