Meditative Psychedelia! Sublime Hallucinations! Contained Chaos! On Melanie Smith at Proyecto Paralelo

It all begins with the color green: a plane is heard in the distance and then in front of you there appears the microscopic view of a snakeskin—or is it a crystal? Or a cell? Maybe it’s a plant or the eyes of a cat. The plane has passed and as you try to decipher what you’re seeing, the music begins immersing you in a meditative state. Fifteen Minutes of Sublime Meditation starts with what could be the voice of the artist or of a computer. This unknown woman will be our guide for the next fifteen minutes, fifteen minutes that might seem like an eternity. At times the anguish is such that one can do no more than continue looking, listening.

The digital universe to which we have transported ourselves is that of our own authorship, full of chaos, anxiety, stagnant water, a frog, many bodies in motion, in revolt, in a constant state of violent alienation. Everything happens all the time: fires, explosions, all stored in a network of servers in whoknowswhere, in the hands of whoknowshowmany. The images don’t stop, just like in a bad acid trip in some universe created by the Wachowski sisters.

On the occasion of the exhibition by Melanie Smith, at the gallery Proyecto Paralelo, I had the opportunity to chat with her about her creative process and to laugh a little at our luck in having a bad network connection. The video arose in response to the confinement compelled by the pandemic and the effects that being enclosed caused on the artist and her production. It also took off from her inability to film or travel, from not being able to recognize a place or a process, and from not being able to work with others.

MS: It’s something that cost me a lot of work; I did about 60 edits of the video. You enter the world of stock footage and you find a huge quantity of archives and multiple possibilities. It was difficult to understand the message, which has been changing and developing in the last year. It was a response to the internal state and moment in which I was living. It’ll be a bit autobiographical, but it’s rather for entering into the personal imagination, into the world’s state of anxiety and interconnectivity.

The video is an immersive experience; you find yourself mesmerized and stunned by what you see on the screen, dazzled by the images coming and going. You end up feeling catatonic and restless, like in that brief but uncomfortable malaise after spending half an hour immersed on social media looking at photos of idontknowwho, as well as articles and services that seem to go in and out of your head in a flash.

MS: It has to do with a question of speed, in the baroque style. The project goes toward the feeling of not being able to rest one’s eyes, of being surrounded by many perspectives. This reflects a somewhat psychedelic state. A state that has sent me back to what I’ve lived inside my body and head throughout the last year. The video sends us back to the anxiety of the moment; it’s composed of thousands of images that pass one after another and then, suddenly, moments of rest, in which we see destroyed landscapes or prostrated bodies in different layers of technology…They’re layers and planes, after layers and planes, all achieved in editing.

At first glance, this project’s creative process might resemble that of previous works by the artist; however, in this case she was located in a studio, tied to a particular space and without any film crew.

MS: The stock footage allowed me to start inserting images that I hadn’t worked with before. It was an outlet, an escape from being confined and unable to move.

Smith ventured into working with an image bank, in an attempt to bring a kind of meaning to the post-pandemic world, overloaded with information. Perhaps it is in this confinement that there arises reflection on the human condition in this age of the internet, mass media, and mobile devices.

In addition to the video, the exhibition brings together a series of paintings that prolong our confusion and admiration. Upon looking closely at the details, a strange sense of bewilderment and familiarity manifests itself. The images appear disparate and fragmented. It is difficult to define exactly what they are. Peacock feathers? Or is it a puddle of polluted water? Is this other one a jellyfish, or is it the sky made orange during a fire? Is it a flower or the inside of a cable? Smith explained to me that she has put several paintings together into a single work in order to reflect a layered montage. Overloaded one atop another or in pairs, what we see are two things that do not correspond, rendering them awkward and making the eyes restless: the left side sees one thing, while the right sees something else.

In Smith’s work, pieces are endowed with a plastic character via the introduction of color: “The moving image appears veiled, flat, and assuaged by a chromatic uniformity that is not random as each color defines a particular category: green for nature, blue for technology, pink for the body, orange for violence […] Color is something that escapes shape. It takes us to different worlds.”

One is no longer in an exhibition venue; it is another space, that of Smith. Or perhaps the space already existed in our unconscious, capable of expressing sensations that a white cube cannot produce. Talking about the difficulties of the creative process during the present world crisis, we come to the pictorial possibility of “slowing down” time in order to curb the hysterical accumulation of images.

MS: They’re always parallel processes, video and painting. […] I’m very interested in the slow, contemplative space of painting, where the eye is able to capture everything in a moment. Painting has always been a stroll through contemplation; the time involved in it creates a meditative/contemplative space. My work circulates between the contemplative space of painting and what the moving image can do.

Smith presents what is undoubtedly a formidable and shocking piece; it leaves behind a bitter taste of digital chaos, which would not exist without the disorder we have created.

A series of photos and textile pieces, produced in collaboration with Annuska Angulo, complement the exhibition. Fifteen Minutes of Sublime Meditation opened during GAMA WEEK at Proyecto Paralelo; it can be visited by appointment.