Mel Chin: Rematch

Spanning 40 years, “Mel Chin: Rematch” a major retrospective at New Orleans Museum of Art features Mel Chin’s most significant works.

The most expansive presentation of conceptual artist Mel Chin’s work to-date, “Mel Chin: Rematch”, organized by the New Orleans Museum of Art, features the artist’s sculptures, video, drawings, paintings, land, and performance art, as well as rarely seen materials from the last four decades.

The exhibition explores the themes that connect Chin’s diverse artistic practice, including violence, alchemy, memory, and empathy, and for the first time contextualizes his major site-specific installations within his broader oeuvre. “Mel Chin: Rematch” emphasizes Chin’s artistic process and conceptual approach and reveals how his engagement with social justice and community collaborations manifest in a complex and highly-varied body of work.

An outgrowth of extensive research on, and archiving of, Chin’s work, the exhibition stresses the collaborative and viral nature of many of his endeavors, highlighting the ways in which he challenges traditional definitions of ownership and authorship through his engagement of other artists and community members. “Mel Chin: Rematch” features approximately 75 works and documents relating to his collective interventions and public works and is organized by recurrent themes and concepts from over the last 40 years.

The presentation of the objects will highlight thematic strands that underscore Chin’s broad range of subject matter, materials, and formal approaches. The exhibition includes major installations such as Operation of the Sun though the Cult of the Hand, 1987, which features a variety of arcane materials through which Chin explored the origins of Eastern and Western alchemy; as well as the more recent installation: The Funk and Wag from A to Z, 2012, a surrealist large-scale arrangement of collages culled from the Funk and Wagnalls encyclopedia. The exhibition also includes documentation of his major land-based projects, from early works such as The Earthworks: See/Saw, 1976, to later ecological, science-based projects like Revival Field, begun in 1990. For this exhibition Chin will also create a new work, a 2013 conceptual diorama for Revival Field, an updated take on this artwork which played a seminal role in promoting the field of phytoremediation, or the use of plants in treating toxic soil.

His recent venture Operation Paydirt, which was conceived from his research, begun in 2006 in New Orleans, is an interdisciplinary project that is continuing to generate thousands of children’s drawings in an effort to garner funding and support for the development of an effective nationwide method for the remediation of lead contaminated soil. The project has led to collaboration with the Environmental Protection Agency, and a major grant in 2011 from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development to scientists who are testing soil remediation methods in New Orleans.

The exhibition will also feature seminal examples of Chin’s intersections into the realm of popular culture and politics, including In the Name of the Place: GALA Committee, 1995-1997, for which Chin collaborated with the TV series Melrose Place to insert socially-engaged content into the show’s sets and props, and KNOWMAD, 1999, a video-game in which players can simulate the experience of driving through the designs of Kurdish rugs.

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Mel Chin, Safe House, a facet of Operation Paydirt / The Fundred Dollar Bill Project, 2008, painted wood, metal hardware, 12 x 16 feet. Courtesy of the artist

Mel Chin, Safe House, a facet of Operation Paydirt / The Fundred Dollar Bill Project, 2008, painted wood, metal hardware, 12 x 16 feet. Courtesy of the artist

Mel Chin, Maquette for Revival Field, 1990, soil, steel, brass, metallic enamel, nylon, acrylic and assorted hardware, 8 x 44 x 44 inches. Collection of Wilhelm Schürmann

from February 21 until May 25, 2014
Mel Chin: Rematch
organized by Miranda Lash
New Orleans Museum of Art
One Collins C. Diboll Circle, City Park
New Orleans, Louisiana

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Mel Chin: Rematch

Spanning 40 years, “Mel Chin: Rematch” a major retrospective at New Orleans Museum of Art features Mel Chin’s most significant works.

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