Mel Brimfield: This Is Performance Art

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From 9 April 2011 Yorkshire Sculpture Park is showcasing the work of Mel Brimfield, a London-based artist and curator particularly interested in Performance Art and who creates playful alternate histories inspired by real artists, artworks and pop culture influences. Recognising that performance art is difficult to document and represent accurately, Brimfield toys with the truth and produces fabricated information, objects and epherema to support her often comical parallel realities. For her exhibition in the Bothy Gallery at YSP, Brimfield re-imagines the space as ‘Room 27' of a major museum survey entitled This is Performance Art. Room 27 considers The Body As Sculptural Objectand begins with a timeline of The History of Performed Sculpture and Dance, based aesthetically on the important timeline of Twentieth Century Art in Tate Modern. Brimfield's version of events includes artists such as Gilbert and George alongside Morecambe and Wise. Subsequent spaces in the gallery feature key works from Brimfield's history of Performance Art, including a film about the fictional sculptor and dancer Alex Owens, based on the popular 1980s film Flashdance. Through photographs and film, Brimfield reimagines the character as a young female sculptor struggling to succeed in the macho world of 1970s minimalism, as realised in the monumental welded works of Richard Serra, Donald Judd and others. In Brimfield's version Owens overcomes adversity by devising a choreographic technique that integrates dance and sculpture. Other works in the exhibition further demonstrate Brimfield's capacity to subvert the truth and create entirely fictional scenarios that prove to be intuitively plausible. The YSP exhibition grows from Brimfield's 2010 residency at Camden Art Centre and will include new commissions for YSP created in collaboration with the important performance artist, Bruce McLean. Brimfield is also devising a new work specifically for YSP to be performed on 18 June 2011.