Nathaniel Mellors
30 Nov 2012 - 26 Jan 2013
NATHANIEL MELLORS
Recent collaboration before THE SAPROPHAGE
30 Novebember 2012 - 26 January 2013
Recent collaborations before THE SAPROPHAGE is an installation of new film, digital print and painting by Nathaniel Mellors, developed in collaboration with Gwendoline Christie and Chris Bloor. It will be Nathaniel’s 2nd exhibition at MONITOR.
The camera lens focuses on two figures in conversation. A blonde woman dressed in an outfit mid-way between the Avenging Angel and a salt-cellar, wearing a pair of strange protective glasses, is shouting from the Los Angeles hills. An equally unlikely character wearing an absurd mass of things including a panoply of Angry Birds merchandise and an oxygen mask answers back, shouting from a grotty East London back-yard. The two discuss their condition, describing a ‘cultural apocalypse’ of which they appear to be the survivors. They claim to be trapped in a “permanent present” in which any sense of history or possible future have been exorcised; a peculiarly decadent situation.
THE SAPROPHAGE (2012) was developed with Mellors’ long-term collaborators Gwendoline Christie, Johnny Vivash and David Birkin, in Los Angeles, East London and Greece, respectively. Christie plays ‘Shemihaza The Nephilim’, taking on an additional co-directorial role, while Johnny Vivash plays ‘Terry’. Both characters appear stupefied by the arrival of a third character: The Saprophage (David Birkin). A wholehearted tribute to Pasolini’s unrealised St Paul, The Saprophage is an innocent preacher who yearns to bring spirituality to the United States but who in Mellors’ version has an additional ‘ecological’ condition – he feeds on decomposing matter. Although ‘The Saprophage’ walks onto land at ‘St.Paul’s bay in Lindos, the filmed sequence suggests that all three characters in fact inhabit the same strange cultural landscape. Presented for the first time in Rome, THE SAPROPHAGE mixes the distinctly surreal and grotesque vein that has been a fundamental characteristic of Mellors’ approach with a newly liberated digital sensibility.
THE SAPROPHAGE is shot in three different locations, using only an iPhone camera and featuring a series of deliberate digital glitches and data-mashing processes. The narrative includes a docu-fiction style rewind back to Gwendoline Christie and Mellors in their LA studio, with Christie acutely critical of Mellors’ script and approach. Is this reality or performance? In The Saprophage Mellors’ folds his own past in on itself, recurrent themes and reflections on contemporary art are set up and taken-apart at remarkable speed, a compulsive richness emerging from a deliberately flat, absurdist premise.
For the first time the artist has incorporated and combined digital prints – made by replacing certain patterns of letters in the digital code of video stills from The Saprophage with specific thematic words pertinent to the script – with strange painting techniques involving spray-paint and stucco-plasterwork – this series SAPRO_DIGITALIS is produced in collaboration with artist Chris Bloor who Mellors has previously worked with on his Venus of Truson series of photograms (first exhibited at Illuminazioni at the Venice Biennale 2011) as well as the curation of :Hypercolon: at SMART Project Space, Amsterdam (2011) and The Nest at CoBrA Museum, Amstelveen (2011).
Until 26 January 2013
Nathaniel Mellors (1974, lives and works between Amsterdam e Los Angeles)
Selected Solo Show: Ourhouse, Episode 3 – The cure of Folly, Malmö Konsthall, C-salen, Malmö, Ourhouse, Episode 3 feat. BAD COPY, Salle de Bains, Lyon, Ourhouse, Episode 3. BAD COPY, Matt’s Gallery, London, Art & Humor: What Could Be and What Is, Nathaniel Mellors’ lecture for Frieze Magazine, Wide Open Scholl, Hayward Lecture Theatre, Hayward Gallery, Southbank, London, 2012; Nathaniel Mellors, Cobra Museum, Astelveen, Hypercolon, SMART Projects, Amsterdam, Nethaniel Mellors, I.C.A. London, 2011; Ourhouse, De Hallen, Haarlem, The 7 Ages of Britain Teaser, Kiasma, Helsinki, Finland, 2010; Giantbum, Stedelijk Museum Bureau, Amsterdam, Giantbum, Lombard – Freid Projects, New York, 2009. Selected Group Show: British Art Show 7 – In The Days of the Comet, CCA, Glasgow, PQ2011 – Prague Quadrennial of Performance Design and Space, Prague, La Biennale di Venezia – 54th International Art Exhibition – ILLUMinations, Venice, Un’Espressione Geografica, Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, Turin, 2011; British Art Show 7 – In The Days of the Comet, Nottingham City Art Gallery, Notthingam, More Pricks Than Kicks, David Roberts Foundation, London, Hey, We’re Closed! – Hayward Gallery, London, 2010; Contour 2009, 4th Biennial of Moving Image, Mechelen, Belgium Art & Research 2008, Montehermoso, Vitoria-Gasteiz, The Time Surgeon, ArtSway’s New Forest Pavilion, Palazzo Zenobio, Venice Biennale, 2009.
Recent collaboration before THE SAPROPHAGE
30 Novebember 2012 - 26 January 2013
Recent collaborations before THE SAPROPHAGE is an installation of new film, digital print and painting by Nathaniel Mellors, developed in collaboration with Gwendoline Christie and Chris Bloor. It will be Nathaniel’s 2nd exhibition at MONITOR.
The camera lens focuses on two figures in conversation. A blonde woman dressed in an outfit mid-way between the Avenging Angel and a salt-cellar, wearing a pair of strange protective glasses, is shouting from the Los Angeles hills. An equally unlikely character wearing an absurd mass of things including a panoply of Angry Birds merchandise and an oxygen mask answers back, shouting from a grotty East London back-yard. The two discuss their condition, describing a ‘cultural apocalypse’ of which they appear to be the survivors. They claim to be trapped in a “permanent present” in which any sense of history or possible future have been exorcised; a peculiarly decadent situation.
THE SAPROPHAGE (2012) was developed with Mellors’ long-term collaborators Gwendoline Christie, Johnny Vivash and David Birkin, in Los Angeles, East London and Greece, respectively. Christie plays ‘Shemihaza The Nephilim’, taking on an additional co-directorial role, while Johnny Vivash plays ‘Terry’. Both characters appear stupefied by the arrival of a third character: The Saprophage (David Birkin). A wholehearted tribute to Pasolini’s unrealised St Paul, The Saprophage is an innocent preacher who yearns to bring spirituality to the United States but who in Mellors’ version has an additional ‘ecological’ condition – he feeds on decomposing matter. Although ‘The Saprophage’ walks onto land at ‘St.Paul’s bay in Lindos, the filmed sequence suggests that all three characters in fact inhabit the same strange cultural landscape. Presented for the first time in Rome, THE SAPROPHAGE mixes the distinctly surreal and grotesque vein that has been a fundamental characteristic of Mellors’ approach with a newly liberated digital sensibility.
THE SAPROPHAGE is shot in three different locations, using only an iPhone camera and featuring a series of deliberate digital glitches and data-mashing processes. The narrative includes a docu-fiction style rewind back to Gwendoline Christie and Mellors in their LA studio, with Christie acutely critical of Mellors’ script and approach. Is this reality or performance? In The Saprophage Mellors’ folds his own past in on itself, recurrent themes and reflections on contemporary art are set up and taken-apart at remarkable speed, a compulsive richness emerging from a deliberately flat, absurdist premise.
For the first time the artist has incorporated and combined digital prints – made by replacing certain patterns of letters in the digital code of video stills from The Saprophage with specific thematic words pertinent to the script – with strange painting techniques involving spray-paint and stucco-plasterwork – this series SAPRO_DIGITALIS is produced in collaboration with artist Chris Bloor who Mellors has previously worked with on his Venus of Truson series of photograms (first exhibited at Illuminazioni at the Venice Biennale 2011) as well as the curation of :Hypercolon: at SMART Project Space, Amsterdam (2011) and The Nest at CoBrA Museum, Amstelveen (2011).
Until 26 January 2013
Nathaniel Mellors (1974, lives and works between Amsterdam e Los Angeles)
Selected Solo Show: Ourhouse, Episode 3 – The cure of Folly, Malmö Konsthall, C-salen, Malmö, Ourhouse, Episode 3 feat. BAD COPY, Salle de Bains, Lyon, Ourhouse, Episode 3. BAD COPY, Matt’s Gallery, London, Art & Humor: What Could Be and What Is, Nathaniel Mellors’ lecture for Frieze Magazine, Wide Open Scholl, Hayward Lecture Theatre, Hayward Gallery, Southbank, London, 2012; Nathaniel Mellors, Cobra Museum, Astelveen, Hypercolon, SMART Projects, Amsterdam, Nethaniel Mellors, I.C.A. London, 2011; Ourhouse, De Hallen, Haarlem, The 7 Ages of Britain Teaser, Kiasma, Helsinki, Finland, 2010; Giantbum, Stedelijk Museum Bureau, Amsterdam, Giantbum, Lombard – Freid Projects, New York, 2009. Selected Group Show: British Art Show 7 – In The Days of the Comet, CCA, Glasgow, PQ2011 – Prague Quadrennial of Performance Design and Space, Prague, La Biennale di Venezia – 54th International Art Exhibition – ILLUMinations, Venice, Un’Espressione Geografica, Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, Turin, 2011; British Art Show 7 – In The Days of the Comet, Nottingham City Art Gallery, Notthingam, More Pricks Than Kicks, David Roberts Foundation, London, Hey, We’re Closed! – Hayward Gallery, London, 2010; Contour 2009, 4th Biennial of Moving Image, Mechelen, Belgium Art & Research 2008, Montehermoso, Vitoria-Gasteiz, The Time Surgeon, ArtSway’s New Forest Pavilion, Palazzo Zenobio, Venice Biennale, 2009.