AK-47 assault rifles (cut and welded)
54” x 54” x 3”
Courtesy of the Artist
In 1976 at Hermann Park in Houston, Texas, Mel Chin debuted his first work in the city he was born. See/Saw,consisted of two six-by-six foot “planter boxes” set approximately 60 feet apart that were linked by a hydraulic system. A participant standing on one part of the “incised” ground would slowly sink while watching the other section of the ground silently and simultaneously rise. Since then, Chin has exhibited his poetic and thought-provoking work across the globe with multiple retrospectives, most recently, Mel Chin: All Over the Place at Queens Museum in 2017, which covered over forty years of work as part of a massive multi-location exhibition. Smaller but no less impactful, Mel Chin: Inescapable Histories, a solo exhibition of twenty works ranging in date from 1988 through 2022 opened this week and will remain on view in The Gallery at UTA through March 30, 2022.
Mel Chin’s conceptual work utilizes painting, sculpture, film, drawing, collage, and other creative media to address complex social and political issues facing contemporary society. Chin is known for the broad range of approaches he enlists in his art, including works that require multi-disciplinary, collaborative teamwork, and works that enlist science, history, and politics as components or layers to develop his ideas.
Chin also insinuates art into unlikely places: destroyed homes, toxic landfills, and even popular television that investigate how art can provoke greater social awareness and responsibility. He created Revival Field(1991), pioneering the field of “green remediation,” the use of plants to remove toxic, heavy metals from the soil. From 1995-1998 he formed the GALA Committee, a collective that produced In the Name of the Place a public art project conducted on American prime-time television. His Fundred Project (2008-present) invests in actions to end childhood lead-poisoning through mass public engagement via the creation of art currency as a means for policy-maker education.
Hebron marble, wood, olive wood on plaster and drywall
81” (diameter)
Courtesy of the Artist
He continues to produce original films such as 9-11/9-11 (2007), a film to decenter preoccupations that engender nationalism, winning the Pedro Sienna Award for Best Animation, National Council for the Arts and Cultures, Chile, 2007; and L’Arctique est Paris (2015), to deliver the poignant warnings of a Greenlandic subsistence hunter to an international audience for COP21. In the summer of 2018, he filled New York’s Times Square with his massive sculpture Wake on the ground and an augmented-reality project Unmoored, in the air, creating an experiential portal into a past maritime industry and a future of rising waters.
Chin’s work was documented in the popular PBS television program Art of the 21st Century and he is the recipient of many awards, grants, and honorary degrees from organizations such as the National Endowment for the Arts, New York State Council for the Arts, Art Matters, Creative Capital, and the Penny McCall, Pollock/Krasner, Joan Mitchell, Rockefeller and Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundations, among others. In 2019, he received a prestigious MacArthur Fellowship, and in 2021 he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
In association with his exhibition in The Gallery at UTA, Mel Chin will discuss his work in an hour-long gallery talk starting at 12:30 p.m. on Thursday, February 17. A reception will occur on Friday, February 18.