CURRENT EXHIBITIONS

MELANIE SMITH
SPIRAL CITY/CIUDAD ESPIRAL
SEPTEMBER 26- DECEMBER 30, 2007

Melanie Smith relates her experience of living in Mexico City through painting, video, photography, sculpture and installation. Her works draw from a broad range of perspectives on the city, including aerial views and visions of street life and retail sites, capturing broad patterns of settlement, economic diversity, excesses of colors, and social structures. Through a diverse range of media, including painting, video and sculpture, she explores how economic and social patterns of the city translate into artistic forms.

Born in 1965, in Poole, England, Melanie Smith has been living and working in Mexico City since 1989. Her work has been included in major exhibitions in Mexico as well as Europe and the United States. She has recently exhibited at the Tate Britain and the Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego. Spiral City was curated by Cuauhtemoc Medina, an art critic, curator and historian, who is a Researcher at the Institute for Aesthetic Research at the National University of Mexico and Associate Curator of Latin American Art Collections at Tate Gallery in London. Spiral City originated at the National University of Mexico, Mexico City, and its first US destination is The Lab at Belmar.

MANUAL LABORS
POOP DECK PROJECT 2
ROCKTOBER 19-DECEMBER 30, 2007

Manual Labors is an exploration of the ways the world is catalogued and ordered. The exhibit pairs rocks from the collection of the Lakewood Heritage Center with poems written by 37 contemporary poets chosen for diversity of style, philosophy and experience. Each rock is a “mano,” or a grinding stone used to grind corn or wheat on a “metate,” a larger flat stone, to make tortillas or breads.  The rocks were brought into the collection of the Heritage Society in 1984, and each was marked with an “accession,” or acquisition, number in India ink. Each poet was assigned one stone and asked to handwrite a poem or a part of a poem, less than 100 words long about their rock. Each poem is displayed with the rock it written for and the pen used to create the manuscript.