a few words and a few notes:
Mel Chin in Conversation with Sara Reisman
Thursday, March 10, 2016
6 to 8pm
Mel Chin, Night Rap, 1993. [Image Description: A photograph of a microphone that is transfixed to a police baton on a microphone stand that sits on a dark cement floor with a white wall behind it.]
This conversation between artist Mel Chin and Artistic Director Sara Reisman featured dialogue and song. Chin’s Cross for the Unforgiven (2012), featured in the exhibition When Artists Speak Truth... (November 12, 2015 - March 19, 2016), offers a painfully timely critique of the accessibility of guns in American culture. Chin inserts art into unlikely places, including destroyed homes, toxic landfills, and even popular television, investigating how art can provoke greater social awareness and responsibility.
Chin also promotes “works of art” that have the ultimate effect of benefiting science, such as his ongoing project Revival Field – a pioneer in the field of green remediation, using plants to remove toxic, heavy metals from the soil – and his recent Operation Paydirt/Fundred Dollar Bill Project, an attempt to make New Orleans a lead-safe city. These projects are consistent with a conceptual philosophy, which emphasizes the practice of art to include sculpting and bridging the natural and social ecology.