Marfa Country Clinic announces Aquarius Rising, an exhibition of new works by Natalie Melendez, featuring recent collages, reliefs, and a video installation. The works will be on display at the clinic at 105 E Oak St. in Marfa.
Anchored in the tradition of collage and assemblage, Natalie Melendez’s work recontextualizes objects and images drawn from mass-media sources and popular culture. Melendez has been making collages for as long as she can remember. Using images gleaned from books and magazines (including many from 1960s and 1970s issues of Life and Time), in black-and-white and color, figurative and abstract, her collages are clusters of small and irregularly-shaped visual fragments floating against a neutral background.
The paper fragments are combined in delicate and elaborate compositions in which the occasional use of color is often the main formal connection. For Melendez, collage-making is an activity she likens to jamming, a spontaneous experimenting in free flow, tuning in with the embedded meaning of the found images. Images of gloomy warfare, body parts, art reproductions, bits of colors and textures collide with illustrations or diagrams from the occult and esoteric culture.
Melendez grew up on the edge of a community of counterculture figures such as Kenneth Anger and artists working in the lineage of Wallace Berman, whose works Melendez reveres and pays homage to in the collages included in the exhibition. Also featured are three monochrome reliefs, each made of a rectangular piece of cattle panel, hidden behind a thick and dense mass of plastic grocery bags chaotically attached to its structure. Weathered plastic bags hooked to cattle panels are a common sighting in rural America, and one that can reveal poetry and grace behind its unsightliness.
Although made from cheap and widely disregarded material, the works are lush, cushy, and seductive objects. Echoing the reliefs, a 10-minute video piece is presented for the first time. Made of various excerpts filming astray plastic grocery bags blowing in the streets with the same elegance as a dancer on stage, this work both complements and hints at the origins of the inspiration for the reliefs. The work also extends Melendez’s collage practice into moving images.
Natalie Melendez grew up in California and lives in Marfa. Her work has been exhibited, among others, at Maintenant and Club Nowhere, both in Marfa, and in the group show Civil Pleasures at The Spire in San Antonio (2019).