Archive 2008-09
Mark Melvin
- Venue: Fine Art Lecture Theatre
- Start: Wed, 26 Nov 2008 11:00:00 GMT
- End: Wed, 26 Nov 2008 13:00:00 GMT
Mark Melvin is a Mercury Prize winning artist working in video, sound, performance and installation. Melvin carries out the majority of his work in the UK, often working in collaboration with other practitioners from different creative fields. What can be seen in his work throughout is a preoccupation with the work as process, and in turn looping, sequence and rhythmic iteration have been prominent in their construction.
He often experiments with various cycles and levels of repetition, be it a discussion of the habitual and routine, investigations into recollection and memory or appropriation from popular culture. These loops and repetitions are always fractured by a series of interruptions and reworkings, so that although the pieces are often cycles of appropriated songs, films or words in their entirety, a linear narrative or harmony is always broken, which arrests overlooking the passing of time. His work is metaphorically (and sometimes literally) shot through with a persistent and interrupted beat, which marks out time: producing and performing time for his collaborators, participants and viewers. In his early work he experimented with sound, performance and video drawing on the social encounter. What interested him was a balance between an engagement with cultural memory, often through popular music, and a concern for the formal characteristics of musical composition and physical gesture.