Melanie Smith: Interpreting Chaos

Melanie Smith’s paintings of hazy cityscapes and her installations of fluorescent orange doodads sold by street vendors capture the dizzying lack of urban planning and the loud, kitsch consumerism that people love and hate about Mexico City.

Over the last two decades, the British native has become one of Mexico City’s best-known contemporary artists. Her career here has taken her to major international venues, including London’s Tate Britain museum, the Miami Art Museum, and the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego.

Recently Smith’s work has been changing, her paintings becoming more abstract. Her earlier, strikingly large canvases show smoggy cityscapes. Lately, painting on a smaller scale, the artist is distancing herself from the city’s urban imagery that has dominated her work since she arrived in Mexico.

After finishing art school in Reading, England, Smith wanted to get out of Europe.  She and some art school friends came to Mexico in 1989, planning to stay a few months. Smith didn’t really realize what she was getting herself into: “It was sort of awe-inspiring, I had no idea of the size of the city,” she says.

She rented a high-ceilinged studio right in the thick of it, on Licenciado Verdad in the Centro Histórico near the Zócalo. Living downtown, the constant activity, throngs of people, and masses of cheap goods being sold on the streets captured her imagination: “that really got me going,” she says. Smith worked in that studio until 1996, when an earthquake left huge cracks in the walls of the building. “I got scared after that,” she says, and moved from studio to studio around the Roma, Condesa, and Santa Maria la Ribera neighborhoods for several years.

In the mid-nineties, Smith began noticing the color orange everywhere she walked in the Centro Historico. It was “really in your face,” she says. Even on streets where grey concrete overwhelmed everything else, an orange sticker or price tag would find its way into her line of sight. She remembers it as the color of the signs and balloons used by street merchants and shops to try to sell things; but that it was also the color of nylon rope, plastic tubing, and inflatable toys. The color inspired her Orange Lush series of installations; Smith amassed these garish, intestine-like objects and stuck them to wall panels or in large boxes, “to suggest this kind of homogeneity of the way things are sold in Mexico, in big quantities.”

Between 1998 and 2002, Smith took a series of aerial photographs called Tianguis, depicting the improvised street markets that spring up throughout the city. Brightly colored tarps stretch across entire avenues, creating splashes of color in an otherwise dreary urban landscape.

Over the past six months, Smith has been working on a project that, so far, includes fifty small paintings, each one responding to the last. Some of the paintings still make reference to smog-obscured buildings, but the places are indistinct, dreamlike. Trying to be more spontaneous, Smith says, “is a bit torturous but I think you have to play around with the materials to see what comes out.”

On a recent afternoon, Smith welcomed me into her spacious studio on a quiet side street in the San Pedro de Los Pinos neighborhood for a chat over what she jokingly described as a cup of “proper English tea.” She has an easy-going air about her, and is clearly committed to her work and pleased to talk about her successes and struggles.

Last spring Smith bought this 1950s-era house to be her studio getaway from the bustle of activity at her nearby apartment where her two children, Oliver, 8, and Mila, 3, are “still a lot of work.”

The open plan ground floor is painted a clean white, and a wall-sized window swings open onto a patch of sunny garden. “It is quite a domestic place, but I needed something that was multi-functional,” Smith says. Since she has only been using the studio for a few months, she says it still feels a bit empty, without the clutter she’s accustomed to in her workplace.

Her recent works are grouped in clusters on a narrow shelf that runs around the perimeter of the main downstairs room. They are painted on rectangles of wood, cardboard, and fiberboard in mostly browns and grays, with traces of bright colors like green and red.

Someday, Smith plans to display these smaller works as one piece—like a large linear collage—but for now she is concentrating on discovering the threads that link them all together. “I’m interested in creating a loose narrative, letting the work come out as it needs to come out.” Like many people who have spent several years in Mexico City, Smith says she has gone back and forth on whether or not to stay in the megalopolis, but feels its draw each time she leaves.

From 2002 to 2006, Smith and her family lived in Tepoztlán, Morelos, about an hour’s drive south of the city. Just before leaving she collaborated with her husband, filmmaker Rafael Ortega, on a film which was a continuous shot taken from a helicopter coiling higher and higher over the dense city, eventually fading away. Although she didn’t realize it at the time, the film, titled Spiral City, seemed to represent a deliberate pulling away from the city, “almost like that was some kind of separation or a goodbye.”

Smith and her family spent a year in Spain in 2006 before returning to Mexico City last summer. She found Europe this time around to be pleasant but bland, and longed for the stimulating chaos of Mexico City. “When you don’t have it, something’s missing somehow.”

Now, Smith is looking at the motifs of her earlier body of work with a fresh eye. As she layers images of Mexico with textures of memory in the new paintings, she is “grappling with their content,” and trying to just let one painting lead her to the next.