MELANIE DAI MEDEIROS
Thesis Defense August 15, 2020
I am an interdisciplinary visual artist who has returned to life in Rhode Island after spending a decade as a transient in several coastal locations across the United States. I seek materials and processes that elaborate on the inconsistencies of memory both in the narrative of imagery and physicality of the material. In this program my work began as an introspection into my own memory and its innate inconsistencies. In the midst of uncovering these narratives, I focused my attention on a series of events I could recall from when I was the same age as my children. In thinking of these past events, I became frustrated and acutely aware of the absence left by the deaths of my elders to verify and elaborate on these snippets of information. I no longer had someone who could confirm or deny these memories.
With this realization I came to value the time I spent with those around me with a heightened awareness. An unspoken tradition in my family are multigenerational excursions out together to explore the island that has become our recent heritage. Knowledge is passed down with equal respect from fisherman, quahoggers, farmers, hunters, biologists, and geologists. One uncle will lament on the decimation of their beehives in response to the farming practices on and offshore while another will describe the layers of geology in respect to the current water crisis on the island. Cousins point out favorite deer trails and pull up invasive species of seedlings that are threatening the trees while my aunt and children collect the Asian shore crabs that are chewing away at our native seagrasses. We find pieces of the abandoned military base in between beach worn shells, bones, and driftwood as we pick up the trash that has washed ashore from the activities on the bay. This has led me to contemplate something bigger than my own selfish thoughts and reflections. I began to seek the essence of the land that is part of me and as such has become a part of my children.
Simultaneously seeking the past and present of a parcel of coastline, a drawing in three dimensions is sprawled across the floor engaged in the act of translating a stretch of earth manipulated by time, elements, man-inflicted trauma and its powers of rejuvenation. The work is a visual experience that encourages the viewer to look in new ways and discover what lies before them. The paper climbs, rolls and overlaps in haphazard layers and overhanging formations in response to an intersection of land and bay. Monochromatic palette emphasizes the variety of forms found within search for the elements of ecology, geology, and spirituality of this coastal intersection centrally situated in Rhode Island. Charcoal lines oscillate from representational depictions to rhythms and patterns referencing the composition of the soil itself with overlapping and intertwined elements giving voice to and pointing out the life force taken for granted under our feet. This installation examines the memory contained within a place while celebrating the land’s innate cyclical and regenerative qualities.
Memory itself is not a concrete concept and can change and be unintentionally altered based off of current experience, exposure, needs, and desires. Memory is layered and accumulative and can be transparent or opaque depending on the moment of recall. It is fluid and enigmatic. With each installation this piece is inevitably changed based on lighting, environment, and the effect of the passage of time on materials in visual affinity with the landscape itself where each day the tide comes, the earth composts and grows, animals are born, forage, and die, the weather wears, and things are in constant state of flux. As Heraclitus of Ephesus declared, “No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it’s not the same river and he’s not the same man.”[1] Here, the intricate nature of the landscape is captured using natural materials of fibers and charcoal formed by manufacturing and handmade processes in visual affinity with the landscape that bears the impact of manmade and natural formed influences. The relationship between the object and the environment overlap, providing a passage of meaning between the two. As we interpret the entire system of found object and remnants, landscape and meaning, the question arises: As our own perception meanders through a narrative lens, is the dynamic landscape that surrounds the objects also forgetting or are events on this earth forever forged in its soil?
The transfiguration from one form to another in this installation investigates how through living, dying, and falling apart, life leaves an ancestral trace and becomes embodied into the landscape. Beginning with an investigation of a found skull from the island’s present day most iconic creature, the white-tailed deer, the work moved into an investigation of its environment and history. Through this archeological style pursuit, the reverberation of centuries leaving its impact on the present moment in this particular space has been called upon to speak its truths. It is a landscape that has been populated and unpopulated, fought over and abandoned, farmed, turned to dessert, and finally reclaimed by nature currently with a high percentage of invasive species, while bearing the brunt of the excess suburban waste from the other side of the bay. Through a repetitive still life, I have documented the ancestral trace highlighting this landscape’s innate regenerative power alongside a critical commentary on the trauma human impact has on an ecosystem.
My practice is in conversation with neuroscientist Antonio Damasio’s theory of consciousness in my search for awareness of the collective memory left by the many lives deposited and collected in a place. Like Damasio’s theories I am striving to capture the duplicity of consciousness between the known (representational) and the felt (spiritual, for lack of a better term). However, while he is focused on the present moment as conjured by the human mind, I am searching for the consciousness of a landscape contained within its memories, but without a present conscious thought there can be no recollection of the past. Nature, in specific the land itself, has a consciousness or rather a memory and strives to right itself from the damages that humans, animals, and invasive plants have willingly or unwillingly rendered.
The representational side of this body of work starts from direct observation of visual cues in addition to the echoic, tactile, and olfactory senses to describe the known facts in a memory to bring awareness to our present moment. The installation translates artifacts of the land from the remains and residue of mammals and invertebrates who knew this land intimately from the rocks and branches that have been weathered by the winds and tides, to the debris left behind from modern day boaters, shipping barges, fisherman, past residents, and the abandoned military base. Each piece is borrowed and studied to discover its textures, smells, shapes, forms, and history. Once gathered and observed the objects are either left in their representational form or reimagined, allowing them to delve into the variable, or the subjective conscious experience of life.
Objects are transformed either two or three dimensionally using materials that could be obtained from the land such as charcoal and paper pulp derived from natural fibers. Expressive methodologies and monochromatic palette are an entry point into a liminal creative that I use to explore the trace and phenomenological trauma of each object and its contribution to the island. In the addition of each piece and the building of each layer I feel the land’s energy and smell its air. The work has a sense of urgency as I analyze and become acutely aware of the critical status of the island. Every month the bay creeps further and further onto the island’s shores and with each moon tide the water attempts to reclaim the land for its own. Is this the land erasing man’s impact with the healing power of water? Or is it slowly suffocating as it drowns?
Either way it is in a state of constant change. Each fall builds layers of leaves, each storm reclaims some of the land while conversely depositing new rocks, shells, and debris, and each life leaves its trace on the land in some way or another. Herein lies the interesting phenomena of parallel perspective. Each of these objects had its own life with unique challenges and experiences that led to its eventual discovery on this 10.12 square mile chunk of land in the middle of Narragansett Bay.
Influential precedents for my work include the visual work of Janaina Tschäpe who incorporates themes of aquatic, plant, and human life to suggest dreamlike, abstract landscapes that blur perceptions of illusion and reality.[2] Her attraction to repetition and exploring in multiples hints at a story left for the viewer to discover their own narrative and emboldens us to desperately seek it. What will happen next? Her work launches me forward into predictions and ponderings. The work is suspended in a state of frozen motion about to leave our present moment and carry on with its own narrative at any time. Her layers are incongruous in their unity. While nonsensical to write, upon viewing it is easy to understand. The layers dance upon each other and overlap as if they are all floating to their own breeze or drifting in their own tide. I also follow the work of Diana Scherer, a visual artist who works closely with biologists to create work that blends botany and decorative design. Scherer works with the intelligence and perseverance of plants in creating works that resonate in my own practice with their union of art, man, and nature.
The accumulation of the many different environmental circumstances and our individual perceptions of these perspectives lends itself to the overall feeling of a place. As Damasio would argue for humans, the combination of the representational image (in my case the found objects) and the qualia of an experience (the spiritual residual energy of these remnants) formulate consciousness. Life itself leaves its remnants and becomes embodied into the landscape in the work represented as handmade paper crafted into articles of leaves, driftwood, antlers, and other found objects and then interspersed within the ever-changing rolls of paper rendered with charcoal visions of the same subjects. The hidden antlers, driftwood, and deer skulls cause the rolls within the paper itself, comparable to the landscape’s malleable manifestations and flexible nature. The island is regularly transformed by three distinct but closely related phenomena of accumulation from various phases: birth, life, and eventual death, the disintegration and reintegration of that life into the landscape, their spiritual resonance, and the varied biological impact on the surface of the land itself of those accumulations. These factors combine to create the memory of a landscape and in possessing memory lends itself to the very human concept of consciousness. Each memory gathered has an impact on the very soil and surface that manifests itself as the land that I, and many other creatures and plants, observe, experience, and react to.
I advocate for the land itself that the accumulation, transfiguration, and eventual disintegration of found objects reflect the memory or consciousness contained within a landscape.
[1] Heraclitus of Ephesus (c. 535-c.475 B.C.) Greek
[2] https://www.skny.com/artists/janaina-tschape, Sean Kelly Gallery, 2/6/2020
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