Exhibition
Francis Alÿs | The Silence of Ani | CAST
03 Aug 2019 – 23 Aug 2019
CAST
Helston, United Kingdom
Free admission, all welcome
CAST presents Melanie Smith's 'Maria Elena' (2018)
Saturday 13 July - Friday 2 August 2019
Wednesday - Sunday 10am - 4pm | Late opening Friday and Saturday until 9pm
Trained as a painter, Melanie Smith explores the expanded field of painting and its relation to the moving image. CAST presents a looped installation of 'Maria Elena' (2018), one of two films that Smith visited Helston to present in a one-off screening for CAST Film Club in March.
'Maria Elena' was first presented at MACBA Museu d'Art Contemporani de Barcelona and at the Liverpool Biennial' in 2018. The work takes its title from a town situated in the Atacama Desert, one of the world’s driest deserts. It continues Smith’s interest in landscapes marked by industrial development in the Americas during the twentieth century; the settlement of Maria Elena is connected to the oldest salt mine in Chile, which was owned by the Guggenheim family in the 1920s.
Melanie Smith lived for 29 years in Mexico City, but is currently living in London. Recent exhibitions include Liverpool Biennial and MACBA, Barcelona (2018); Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin (2016); Tamayo Museum, Mexico City (2015) and Hammer Museum, Los Angeles and MK Gallery, Milton Keynes (2014). In 2011 she represented Mexico at the 54th Venice Biennale.
'Maria Elena' is presented at CAST as part of a programme of artists’ films relating to landscape and portraiture. ‘Echoes and Returns’ looks back to moving image presentations at CAST in the last year, providing opportunities to see work by some of the international artists shown in Groundwork and as part of the CAST Film Club series. Film installations by Melanie Smith, Francis Alÿs and Manon de Boer will be each be shown for three weeks in CAST’s black box projection space.
Film duration 24 minutes
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