Catherine Melin
In residence in the Basque Country, Buenos Aires, Barcelona, Scotland, Canada or Moscow, Catherine Melin is interested in the emergence of life in urban landscapes whose interstices she photographs and films. From her visual captures, at the origin of the subsequent work on the image, she will retain a jetty, a bridge, a wall or a roundabout, a horticultural greenhouse, a palisade, foundations, building materials, ground marks or elements of urban furniture. It will stop on the drawing in space that draw skateboards, stepping stones and metal structures that make up as many swing structures, propulsion instruments, the video also attaching itself to bodies in motion. All these discoveries, accomplished in the way of travel, that is to say astonishment, will constitute the starting material for future installations. These will combine wall drawings, video projections and constructions, in a game of drifts and tilt of scale, impossible perspectives and dizzying weightlessness.
Catherine Melin distributes in her image creations, the paradoxes of the living: momentum and inertia, flight and rest.
Catherine Melin’s response to the melancholic threat, to the risk of abandonment and asthenia, the index of which she reveals in the mechanisms she sets up, lies precisely in the “possible”. That is to say in the gesture, in the dance, in the construction, again.
Evelyne Toussaint — Elans, détournements et glissements : les stratégies du possible, Extraits, 2009
“More on the Documents d’artistes network: http://www.documentsdartistes.org/melin
“My work is nourished by the urban space or rather by its margins and peripheries, but also by the bodies that wander there, the bodies that move there, the relationships that are established there and the architectures that are made there and undone there. From this coexistence between the ephemeral and the sustainable, between emergence and disappearance, between the new and the fossil specific to contemporary urban territory, I make my raw material. It is a question of dismembering our urbanized landscape even in the fringes of our cities into a fragmented constellation of signs, rhythms and body movements. It is a poetics of the urban and the human, of their games and issues that I try to capture and translate through different media. In recent years, my work has developed around a logic of deploying recomposed spaces.”
Catherine Melin
Catherine Melin
Contemporary
Urban art, drawing, installation, video
French artist born in 1968.
- Localisation
- Marseille, France
- Themes
- Ville