Catherine Melin

Catherine Melin, Roubaix (France) 1968

Period of residence with Asterides-Hangar: April – July 2004

Catherine Melin’s approach to art is a questioning of the “possible.” In philosophy this is differentiated from the impossible as much as it does from the necessary and the incidental, other categories of the modality. What is possible in a district undergoing rehabilitation or in an improbable urban space. What can art do with this reality?
In residence in the Basque country, Buenos Aires, Barcelona, Scotland, Canada or Moscow, Catherine Melin is interested in the sudden appearance of life in the urban landscapes which she photographs and films. In reworking these visual records, Catherine will keep a pier, a bridge, a wall or a roundabout, a greenhouse, a fence, foundations, materials on a building site, marks on the ground or elements of urban furniture. She will notice the lines in space outlining skateboard ramps, trampolines, and the metal structures that make up these structures of impetus, these instruments of propulsion, with the video capturing bodies in movement. All of these discoveries are made whilst in a traveling mode, which is to say open to surprise and which form the raw material for her future installations. These installations associate wall drawings, video projections and constructions, in an interplay of derived elements, changes of scale, impossible perspectives and vertiginous weightlessness.

catmelin(at)ifrance.com