Mel Chin is one of my favourite artists of all time so I’m glad to be able to post about him for a relevant project. He’s a conceptual artist whose works are commentaries on different aspects of human life such as nature, the environment and various social justice issues. Conceptual art is art where the concepts and ideas involved in the work take precedence over the traditional aesthetic, technical, and material concerns.
His art has explored a variety of locations and settings including popular television, destroyed homes, toxic landfills, and even NYC’s Times Square.
These two works by Mel Chin titled Wake and Unmoored were both displayed at Times Square and used very different media. Wake commented on the city’s complex history of trade, commerce, finances, including the shipping of guns and slaves; consequently, the form of the sculpture resembles a shipwreck combined with the skeleton of a marine mammal.
Unmoored used virtual reality to comment on global warming, such that if viewers looked up at the sky using the Unmoored virtual reality app or a then provided headset, they could see ships and boats floating above them to indicate the exponentially rising sea level.
Two Me was a part of Monument Lab and built in Philadelphia’s own City Hall courtyard. It was composed of two seven-foot-tall granite pedestals with fully accessible ramps built for both. Each pedestal was inscribed with the word “Me.” According to Mel Chin, the purpose of the monument was to invite any person to ascend onto the pedestal to pose as living monuments themselves. This challenged the American value of individualism since there are two “Me”s, reminding viewers about unity and being part of a collective society.
Mel Chin’s Revival Field is more on the conceptual art side rather than monument, yet it deserves to be mentioned for its unique process and implications. Mel Chin began this as an experiment in collaboration with agronomist Dr. Rufus Chaney to test on-site, low-tech remediation methods on contaminated soil in a fenced landfill area. They used special plants called ‘hyperaccumulator’ plants to try to extract heavy metals from the soil. To Mel Chin, he conceptualized the work as him ‘sculpting’ a site or area’s ecology using the scientific process, to ‘carve away’ at the pollution.
I think Mel Chin is an amazing and very intriguing artist and I encourage everyone to check out more of his work!
2020 Foundations 