Bo Melin/ Dagen då jag såg en sibirisk järnsparv ( The day I saw a Siberian accentor ) Mattias Norst

Hangmenprojects

Ringvägen 86, Stockholm

30 mars-1 April 2016

Exhibition review

Bo Melin (b.1964, Sweden) graduated from Konsthögskolan Valand in 1997. Melin is an intermedia artist. Besides large-scale sculptures, his methods include: portrait drawings, installations/surroundings, performance/happenings/workshops, land art, graffiti, and digitally manipulated photography.

His main practice seems to defy the borders of the artwork within public and gallery spaces. He has a strong interest in making the ordinary-extraordinary, making pedestrian-fantastic. The spirit of art making draws from playfulness and a childlike sense of adventure.

Favorite materials of use like hay, pancakes, and banana boxes, hint at Swedish “country-urban” mainstream culture, while people, lakes, the ground, and nature itself are his “material” as well.

By combining country life with the urban surroundings, Melin is being critical of Swedish society using humor and without taking himself out of the equation. One of his works, “Queue” (25 people got together one day and formed queues at five different locations in Stockholm city centre, Stockholm, 2005), exemplifies this perfectly.

The intervention in reality is subtle and gives the feeling of a non-artwork (in the most wonderful way), perhaps as a means to trap some public attention and engagement. Determined to connect with a less ordinary art viewer (a more casual viewer) in streets, junctions, and airports, Meline gives the idea of Land Art and takes a piss at it. By referencing, he claims how paradoxical it is to commit to an ego-driven artistic act to interfere with nature. Melin demonstrates this in homage to American artist Robert Smithson (who is known for his monumental land art pieces) in the work Rolling Woods Robert Smithson (Fotogalleriet, Oslo, 2007) - a humble mobile pseudo-nature piece with a mock tree and a cluster of Swedish Kantarell mushrooms.

Melin is known for his work of making pancake mountains and banana box fortresses inside a slick gallery space, and also transposing these untraversable works by sticking them to a car as a possible mock of a false sustainability facade. Melin roleplays as a street artist that mimics the existing details of the urban space with doubling street pigeons/birds/nobs/water clocks and ashtrays instead of writing a political message or his own name. Melin photoshops Swedish squeaky clean urban suburbs with graffiti create a more chaotic, multicultural city - it seems as wishful thinking driven by a reverse impulse to a photographer's aspiration for a perfect frame.

Melin's sculpting style, as demonstrated here, while monumental and massive, Pop Art-inspired, shows more visual closeness to folk-art, theatre sets, something taken from country fairs and arthouse film productions than to Claes Oldenburg lookalikes (which is what one expects to find in a museum/ Gallery).

This gigantic young Scandinavian-looking guy is sitting quietly still, wearing urban clothes, waiting among the normal life-size trees, with a pair of binoculars hanging from his neck; a bird watcher.

A serenity-like atmosphere came over me. What I felt was surprising in relation to the size of the work - I felt small but calm, like in a natural setting, standing near a big tree. It was the room that felt silly and not the super-sized cartoon-like character made out of hay. The space felt like a white box that is too small to contain a larger-than-life notion of freedom - I felt the installation projected. A White Cube (no matter how ragged it is, like here in Hangmenprojects) is made as such for viewing artwork in a clean, quiet space - without interventions from the outside.

It somehow fails to do its job here, though; it is confined and stuffy yet inseparable from the idea of the work.

Melin has invited Mattias Norström (b.1971), a Konsthögskolan Valand graduate artist from 2002.

In this show, Norström exhibits a surrealistic, funny, and disturbingly enormous white pole that curves through the narrow gallery corridors and ends by hitting a wall. It is actually a humongous Swedish flag pole, as if it were taken from an extravagant country house yard and shoved into a tiny space it does not fit. It feels so gross and unnatural. It is hard not to read this as a strong criticism of the idea of any nationalism. The two works converse perfectly about Swedishness and Swedish nature (if there is such a thing), leaving me wondering long after exiting the gallery space.

#MattiasNorström #BoMelin