mel chin

  • Landscape

    Landscape


    1991
    sheetrock cut to topography of 30th parallel, dirt from local landfill, plywood
    (American landscape painting) oil on linen, wood, plaster, gold and metal leaf
    (Chinese scroll) ink, pigments, ground malachite and azurite on silk
    (Persian miniature) paper mounted on wood, watercolor, oxidized silver leaf

    Landscape is an installation about consumption of the metaphysical, through the presence of art, and about materials, through the evidence of our waste. Three traditional nature-loving philosophies, American Emersonian Pantheism, Iranian Zoroastrianism, and Chinese Taoism are represented through paintings. They offer messages ill-suited to fit contemporary culture where the volume of one’s impact on nature is neatly trucked away and buried from view and meditation is commercially mediated. In this room one is given the opportunity to experience not only “global art” about landscape, but personal interaction with landscape, as trash-laden local landfill seeps from museum walls “rotted” to the contours of the 30th parallel, the latitude that sweeps through the United States, Iran, and China.






  • Ghost

    Ghost


    1991
    chalk on nylon mesh, wood, steel, construction rubble
    Hartford, CT
    10 feet x 30 feet x 35 feet

    Ghost was a temporary installation that recreated the facade of the Talcott Street Congregational Church, Connecticut’s oldest free black church, whose original meeting house stood on this site from 1826 to 1906 and was the cornerstone of a thriving community. This project is not about nostalgia. Ghost functioned as a haunting presence that critiqued the unfulfilled promises of urban renewal. Ghost was intended as a catalyst for continuing critical discussion and developing action in response to those unfulfilled promises.


  • Tantric Dream Diagram

    Tantric Dream Diagram



    1991
    pigment and paper on roofing slate
    14 1/4 x 8 inches

    detail from the installation Degrees of Paradise

  • Degrees of Paradise

    Degrees of Paradise

    1991
    Kurdish-woven carpet, wool, video monitors, laser disc playback, sheetrock, wood, metal tubing, rubber, slate
    9 x 60 x 12 feet

    Degrees of Paradise is a study for the proposed State of Heaven, where an immense, floating, hand-knotted carpet, serving as a symbolic and sacrificial sky, will be placed under a directive that parallels the actual destruction of the ozone layer.

    A Tantric-like image of an atmospheric envelope unfolding as the petals of a fragile flower is flanked by two triangular galleries. In one gallery, a 9 x 24 foot “floating” carpet lingers above the heads of viewers. This “test” rug for the 66 x 66 foot State of Heaven carpet was hand woven by members of a traditional cottage industry in Damiacik, Turkey. The unorthodox pattern is a slice taken from satellite data in April 1989 and imaged by a Cray 2 supercomputer. The larger rug will serve as a scale replica of our imperiled atmosphere.

    With no desire to project his subjective interpretation of the atmosphere onto the rug, Chin sought another partner to extend this vision to a greater objectivity by employing the realms of physics and mathematics. The result of this partnership is prominently displayed in the adjacent gallery, through a “sky” of video monitors. Its triangular configuration echoing the test carpet, the monitors play back the State of Heaven multidimensional fractal program developed by McGill University physicists S. Lovejoy and F. Begin. Their radically new interpretation of meteorological dynamics advanced understanding in the fields of climatology and plate tectonics. The resulting final images generated were returned to the weavers to be reinterpreted in wool.

    Tantric Dream Diagram

    gallery floor plan

  • Study for Support

    Study for Support


    1991
    sheetrock, yellow ribbon, wood, graphite
    22 x 22 inches

  • Support

    Support

    1991
    600 yards of high-grade yellow ribbon, Texas live oak
    138 x 45 x 117 inches
    Note: Texas version

    Consumerism, sentimentality, and war can be suicidal.


    NY version was installed in a triangle park near a New York “Yellow Ribbon Neighborhood” off I-278 Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, Exit No. 33, McGuinness Blvd.
    Note: Confiscated by the authorities after a 3 day run.