Mel Chin: Disparate Acts
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Mel Chin: Disparate Acts September 2–November 1, 2014 Rowan University Art Gallery Mel Chin: Disparate Acts Mel Chin emerged as an activist artist in the mid and people across sectors, including scientists, 1970s with works that were largely motivated naturalists, government agencies, and other artists. by political, cultural, and social circumstances. The GALA Committee Collective, which Chin Over the next forty years, he has created a myriad formed, created a conceptual public art work, In the of installations, public art works, performance- Name of the Place, between 1995 and 1997. The group based work, video, sculpture, objects, and public harnessed the subliminal power of television to engagements works that, in their very making, defy insert activist imagery as props and backdrops in easy classification. Chin rejects formulaic artistic various sets of American prime time’s Melrose Place. boundaries, freeing him to make independent Chin worked with software engineers to choices that explore multifaceted concepts through create KNOWMAD (1999), a video game that a variety of materials, media, and even venues. reinterpreted the rug patterns of nomadic people Chin became fully immersed in the activist into virtual media. The game is based on mapping aesthetic with the ongoing installation, “Revival patterns of Central Asian and Middle-Eastern tribal Field” (started in 1989). In this early environmental people and the way gamers utilize memory. art project, he is recognized as a pioneer in the field Chin’s film,9-11/9-11, was a joint Chilean/USA of phytoremediation, in which hyperaccumulator production that sought to contrast the events of plants are used to absorb toxic metals from the World Trade Center terrorist attack in 2001 contaminated soil. This work ushered in a practice, with the US-supported military overthrow of which he returns to throughout his career, of Chilean President Salvador Allende twenty-eight creating works in collaboration with other groups years earlier. The hand-drawn, 24-minute animation 2 Corsican Connection Study for The Elementary Object, 1992, ink, correction fluid, paint, pencil on paper. 3 depicts fictionalized characters in the two events, in this text are eight of the works that best illustrate interlaced and woven together, resonating as a this premise, beginning with the collage, Safety shared memorial to a terrorizing experience. Paper Safehouse. The thirty-four studies, drawings, and sketches This collage represents Safehouse, which served included in Mel Chin: Disparate Acts, function as a as headquarters for Chin’s public intervention, window into the genesis of his social activist works. Operation Paydirt /Fundred Dollar Bill Project. This Evident are the many materials Chin used to realize ongoing effort advances public education and his diverse and complex ideas and turn them into community engagement through the creation three-dimensional narratives, often matching and collection of Fundreds—original, hand- material to concept to heighten the impact of its drawn interpretations of $100 bills. Chin created message. “hardware” for a 10-foot diameter functioning The selected works in the exhibition focus bank vault door and attached it to the façade of an on this process and thematically question the abandoned house—the Safehouse, which is located in objectivity, reliability, and integrity of information, the St. Roch neighborhood of New Orleans. facts, and events when compromised and corrupted The project brings attention to the continuing by political, social, or cultural agendas. Highlighted indefensible situation in New Orleans, and the Safety Paper Safehouse, 2007-2014, security envelopes with graphite, glue on ragboard. 4 rest of the country, and the need for funding to The title reference to the island of Corsica eradicate childhood lead poisoning from the homes recognizes the political unrest that happened there they live in, the soil they play in, and the schools between the Corsican separatists and the French they attend. This critical health issue, largely government. It is also home of the type of wood, ignored by the government and the corporations briar root, most often used to form the bowl of this that caused it, affects the people least likely to have style of smoking pipe. the means to escape it. Equally volatile is Chin’s study for Internal Safety Paper Safehouse is composed of torn and Medicine: Home y Sew 9. Sketched on tracing paper, pieced together patterned safety paper from the image appears as a transparency in keeping with envelopes used to mail government and business x-ray films, MRI images, or security scans. We can financial documents. The misalignment of edges see the inner works of a GLOCK 9-mm handgun and intermingling of the torn and cut paper in the reconstructed by Chin, in his words, “into a strap- composition of the house and vault door evoke a on, self-contained, action-activated, fully functional, vulnerability and instability that echo the narrative self-inoculating, self-medicating, emergency in the actual site-specific work. Chin posits, “If gunshot trauma treatment kit.” anything, it mirrors the instability and disparity of Once again, ironically, this weapon of choice our capitalist economy and the conditions we live for both law enforcement and urban gangs is in.” devoid of bullets, rendering it harmless and into an In contrast to the fractured composition of Safety apparatus for saving the lives of gunshot victims. Paper Safehouse, the piece, Corsican Connection Study In the illustration, bullets are replaced with the for The Elementary Object, suggests an engineer’s components of a field first-aid kit that includes blueprint schematic. The deliberate rendering is an ACE bandage, a microelectronic radio, saline so meticulously and cautiously executed that it’s as with IV needle and polyethylene tubing, painkiller if the slightest deviation from a precise line would Percodan, epinephrine, and an angiocatheter. cause the work itself to detonate. Chin noted throughout the drawing descriptions The drawing depicts a type of smoking pipe of the items and where they should be inserted often associated with “genteel” society, aristocrats, into the gun. Drawn at the bottom are indications intellectuals, and those in positions of wealth, of a crescent moon and a cross as yet another power, and influence. It is also a common prop in proposition that Chin’s “kit” does not discriminate. popular culture, historical art, and literature. One Another example in which Chin has used can’t ignore the reference to Sir Arthur Conan medium to heighten the explosive impact of issues Doyle’s famous Sherlock Holmes character and his is found in the work, The Syrian Wheel. In this most often used phrase, “It’s elementary.” The pipe interpretation of a noria, red ink is a metaphor for here is wood and rounded and closed with only an the ongoing bloody war in that country. Chin has igniting wick protruding from the top. The diagram long admired the geometry of the norias along the above the pipe drawing illustrates the interior Orontes River in Syria and the Al-Muhammadiya mechanics of a pipe bomb and the pipe. In an ironic at Hama, which served as a model for his 1976 twist, the pipe, or pipe bomb, is a metaphor for installation, Waterwheel/Keeping Still. Chin returned the explosive power and the destructive impact of to produce an image of this wheel as a lamentation Eurocentric ideologies and thoughts on vulnerable about the destruction of monuments, civilians, and societies and economies. the dying prospects for the Arab Spring movement. 5 Internal Medicine: Home y Sew 9, 2014, graphite, colored pencil, staples, pigment on paper. Thickly applied and in layers, the ink drips down To the left of the figure are two vertical clubs. the surface of the paper as if it were blood pouring One is a diagram of a club swaddled with a type from a wound. The wheel floats in space, devoid of of bandage. It is light in weight and tonality, and any anchoring foundation, further emphasizing its floats in space as if an apparition. The impression is decline as cultural icon within the landscape. nonthreatening at first, but becomes so when one Saza (Punishment) Wrap Projection is a commentary realizes the bandages symbolize human skin as a on another kind of tyranny. In this mixed-media metaphor for the inextricable linking of the body study, the naked body represents the Pakistani with pain and torture. The other club is a solid form poet and novelist Jam Saqi. Military dictator, made of dark and densely colored wood and tar. It Mohammed Zia-ul-Haq imprisoned Saqi for nine seems to rise off the surface of the paper, becoming years for his anti-government activities. Chin weighty and foreboding as it reveals itself as a became aware of this case through the efforts weapon. of Amnesty International, executed this work, Turning to more philosophical and cultural and then auctioned it to raise funds for the awareness projects, Chin uses a wood-burning organization. technique in the mixed media study for Signal: The figure appears beaten both physically and Campfire and Historic Associations, a site-specific psychologically. Chin has drawn the image in work commissioned by the Metropolitan Transit graphite in a delicate and measured manner, as if Authority for the Broadway/Lafayette Subway to evoke the powerlessness of political prisoners Station in New York City. Working in collaboration and their circumstances. Half the body is in detail, with Peter Jemison, a member of The Six Nations while the other half is reduced to an outline as a of the Iroquois and Seneca Tribe, Chin sought to commentary on the invisibility of the missing. promote the historical significance of the Native 6 Internal Medicine: Home y Sew 9, detail. 7 The Syrian Wheel, 2014, ink, butcher paper. American trail now known as Broadway.