Melissa Martin

Dining Room, 2006

Medverkade i utställningen WANÅS 2006: Insight Out

Brian Sholis on Melissa Martin in the catalog for WANÅS 2006: Insight Out

Brooklyn-based artist Melissa Martin explores how the human body is imbricated into the socially codified rituals that attend to every act of consumption. In her early work, this exploration was presented in its constituent parts. For example, she made sculptures in which her body would literally disappear, Resting Place (1999) included a bed whose mattress contained a perfect silhouette of her sleeping form; Martin would lie in it, unmoving, during gallery hours, unseen until the viewer was literally hovering above her. She also made absurdly outsized versions of food-product containers: Daddy’s Dozen (2000) was an extremely elongated egg carton, and Mama’s Fresh Milk (2000) a four-foot-tall milk carton. More recently, these investigations have intersected in suggestive ways, taking form as increasingly elaborate, process-oriented sculptural installations, the most recent of which has been created specifically for Insight Out.

Little Pig (2004), presented as her MFA thesis exhibition at Hunter College, consisted of a life-size, realistic pig made from bubblegum that the artist chewed obsessively, carved into sections and presented on a butcher block the size of a single bed. Documentary photographs reveal the Martin’s fidelity to the anatomical structure of the animal, right down to its skeleton. The presentation of the entire animal itself (as opposed to pre-packaged cuts one would find at a butcher shop), as well as the plainly laborious process undertaken by the artist, underscore the artificiality of how consumers are normally presented meat. A more recent work, titled Father (2005), furthers these themes. To make the sculpture, Martin made a cast of her father then re-created his form, to scale, by displaying pre-packaged cuts of “meat” (again made of chewed gum) in a specially constructed commercial refrigerator. Here, Martin’s father, a farmer, is connected viscerally to the end of the production process his work facilitates. Each shrink-wrapped “cut” was for sale individually; purchasing one literally diminished his body.

Martin presents three artworks for Wanås; two interrelated sculptures and one performance. Dining Room, located in the woods, is the skeletal outline of a dining room, replete with table, chairs, windows, a door – all rendered in unadorned wood – and a fireplace, made of brick. For the sculpture Ashes to Ashes, this outdoor, incomplete room was the site of two elaborate feasts – an American Thanksgiving prepared by the Martin family, followed by a Swedish Christmas prepared by the Wachtmeister family. These meals, exactly the type in which attitudes and behaviors are most minutely scripted, were photographically documented and then burned in the fireplace. By consigning them to the same process by which human bodies are cremated, the ghostly evocation of the room will serve as cipher not only for viewers’ personal memories and associations, but also for the traces of this unseen process. Martin gathered the ashes and placed them in two separate urns engraved with the meals’ contents, which will be presented in the Stable next to the photographs, further memorializing her act.

During the opening, Martin literally disappeared into the Wanås landscape. For several weeks, she nurtured lilies of the valley in her bedroom with a combination of spit, blood, and urine from her own body, incubating the seeds and budding flowers in the warmth of her mouth for several hours each day. In the performance Embedded (2006), Martin continued this process in public by inserting her body, dressed in combat gear printed with a camouflage pattern mimicking the grounds at Wanås, into a shallow ditch. These flowers, typically given to those grieving the loss of a loved one, resonate with the “death” that took place in Dining Room, and their growth allegorizes the potential for regeneration inherent in all loss. Together these works memorably fuse Martin’s interests with a broader inquiry into social customs and the relationship between life and death.