What begins as a household chore, evolves into a drunken decadence, with DEBS alone, lost in paint, a drop cloth, and garland. A mural size work titled Portrait of Debs occupies one of the gallery’s walls, and depicts fashion designer David Quinn, aka DEBS painting a room. This itself becomes the impetus for a series of photographic sculptures, newly introduced to Melee’s practice. Initially overpowering in its scale, upon closer inspection, Bower Pool soon reveals its components for what they are, the deflated markers of celebration. While these low-budget materials root the installation in kitsch, they also ground it within a compulsion for embellishment, and its failed transformative quality. Streamers, party favors, lights, and gold decorations spill out on the floor, representing an obsessive accumulation. Drawing its name from Bower birds, who construct lavish, colorful nests as part of a mating ritual, Melee’s installation employs a commercially available above ground pool, overturned and surrounding a column. Often incorporating cast-off quotidian items in his works alongside vividly colored poured paint, Melee points towards a melancholy specific to domestic space, one that is derived simultaneously from familiarity, decoration, and otherness.Īt the exhibition’s center is Bower Pool, a new installation that envelops the gallery’s architecture. In new paintings, sculptures, as well as large-scale installation, Melee continues his investigation of the psychology of the everyday. These formal and sociological works evoke both the history of craft and painting in materiality and execution.Īndrew Kreps Gallery is pleased to announce Semi-Quasi-Bower Recreational, an exhibition of new works by Robert Melee. Exhibited alongside are new, nocturnal skyscapes, pulsating compositions achieved by painting thousands of enamel dots on 4’ x 5’ sheets of black painted aluminum, as well as two new works from Melee’s Bottlecap series, produced by nailing caps from beer bottles into plywood, coated in plaster, and embellished with 23 karat gold, aluminum leaf, and enamel. The abstracted figures, imposing in scale and durable in material, are vivid, nude reimaginings of the classic scarecrow. In “Country,” Melee returns to a series produced in 2007 of monumental bronze sculptures. The installation forms a psychological playground in which one can experience a new analysis of the everyday, one in which the viewer is surrounded by that which is both uncannily familiar and disarmingly strange. Ranging from 4’ to 14’ feet high, these moving boxes-normally relegated to a life of back and forth-further the conversation between painting and sculpture. In “Town,” Melee creates a massive installation of cardboard boxes, painted in hi-gloss enamel and stacked in various compositions suggestive of cityscapes. Creating sensuous installations from everyday materials, Melee’s obsession with the accumulation of cast-off and familiar items is seen in the relationship between the indoor and outdoor spaces of the exhibition-embracing colloquial opposites that allow for two bodies of work to develop in both dialogue and contrast. Thus is born Robert Melee’s Town and Country, an installation created during a three-month residency at MOCA Tucson which straddles the line between highbrow and lowbrow. Susan Sontag explains in her seminal essay “Notes on Camp” that the “essence of ‘camp’ is its love of the unnatural: of artifice and exaggeration”.
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