For the last four yours I have been working with concepts of politics and art openly treading the fine line between art and polemic in exhibitions, articles, drawings and in photos. I have been making installations of looping wire, videos and lately other materials and objects like cushions. Beginning with “It is right to protest” a 40 i-Pad installation for my end of year VCA MCA exhibition I presented crossing electrical wires exposed, for the message of interconnection, electricity and planning. The videos were taken by myself at protests I attended, not as an observer, but as a participant. I have . since used photographs, fabric, banners, paintings, and cushions in installations.
The media I use, including the tangled wires and cords, is an inquiry into the common iphone, video, as memory, or as bypass. In a world of precipitous climate denial and incomprehensible mistreatment of refugees … I am walking the fine line between art and propoganda inviting the question of that line. The self-portrait collage inserts that questioning in a painterly form. Persistence/Resistance is an artistic investigation into the belief that until we fundamentally change the system of power, we protesters are like fly that repeatedly comes back, until…
Melanie Joy is a Melbourne based artist whose practice is predominantly installation based. Her history of displacement and self exile and her burning antagonism to injustice makes her art tread a fine line between polemics and investigation.
She completed a Masters of Contemporary Art at Victorian College of the Arts, 2014.
Her work has been awarded a special show at the Chin Chin Restaurant with a financial reward. She has been asked on two recent occasions to be the judge of the Proud Exhibition of students at the VCA.
Melanie has exhibited at the Red gallery, Linden Gallery, Alternating Current Art Space, the Brunswick Street Gallery and has a show coming up at Rubicon ARI in February.
She is very grateful to have recently undertaken a residency in Barcelona Spain in Gracia, at the Jiwar, where the growing protest movement for independence was underway.
Melanie’s work is held in private collections in Australia and overseas.
Born in South Africa she currently lives in Moreland, Melbourne.
Wires connect on the wall, electric links joining videos of protests taken mostly in Melbourne, some overseas, using iPads and iPhones. The issues are too many, racism, refugee abuse, homophobia, Islamaphobia, climate, war. Many of us organise and walk, or stand with the unfolding banners flapping trying towards change. Spread across a large wall this exhibition, invites viewers to contemplate the fact that (although not reported in the common media) everyday, ordinary people take to the streets, or gather in some way, to show non-acceptance of injustice and intolerance. Nothing is hidden. We cannot be afraid.
Comfortable or not? Cushions
Drawings, paintings, photographs translated to Oxford weave waterproof cushions available through me or at shops around Brunswick.
© MELANIE JOY LAZAROW
