Melanie Crean: Thresholds

Melanie Crean, Ellipses, 2016, film still. Courtesy of the artist and KODA.

KODA House, Building #407B, Colonels Row, Governors Island, New York

On view: September 6-29, 2024

Artist Walkthrough: Saturday, September 21, 2024 from 3-4 pm

Melanie Crean is an artist and educator whose site-specific creative practice focuses on how power structures are created through media, culture, and technology and how these structures can be contested and re-patterned. For her exhibition at KODA, the artist is showing three projects spanning her career that respond to contested sites and spaces, including the body, memory and the historical archive. Each of the presented works is developed eight years apart and occupies one room.

Games To Be Played in Doorways, (2024, part of the Dante Project, in progress) is a storytelling game with a 30-second looped video and a playbook zine being created with the graffiti writer Stole. Visitors are invited to play the game at KODA House and throughout Governors Island, exploring the power of thresholds as in-between spaces where one can contemplate periods of transition.

The Ellipses (2016) project consists of video, performance, sculpture and archival research created to celebrate the lives of two gender non-conforming women living in Connecticut during Reconstruction — Carrie Welton and Rebecca Primus — in order to surface their biographies in local archives. This project emerged from Crean’s research of untold stories of women who made revolutionary strides in civil rights, labor and education. Set around KODA Archives in the exhibition, Melanie Crean: Thresholds continues questioning, who is considered to be an American revolutionary and how are their stories told? Who is missing from the archive, and how might these stories be surfaced and written into history?

Lastly, Phrenology (2008) investigates the perception of space and reclamation of memory through writings created by incarcerated women, presented visually through a variety of platforms. The work was created with six women in a writing workshop that Crean facilitated at Bedford Hills Correctional Facility in 2007. Initially in their writing, participants related mainly to spaces from their past, then slowly grew to detail their present surroundings and the possibility for future changes of environs. To accompany these texts, the artist photographed spaces that would serve as visual analogies to the writings, to facilitate the women’s voices to access the outside world that was otherwise denied to them. Revisiting this project on Governors Island, Crean investigates spatial memory as she continues her work on envisioning a future with the sense of safety, security and mental health at its core.

Press Contact: Stewart Campbell, +1 (917) 557-3857, stewart@artistcommunications.com

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Artist Bio

Melanie Crean works primarily with video, performance, emerging technologies and social engagement. She frequently references myth and different forms of storytelling to investigate contemporary social issues and reimagine cultural archetypes such as the hero, the unruly woman, the nature of justice and the story of America.

Crean often works collaboratively, experimenting with different forms of participatory world building and design futuring, celebrating the imagination as a political space, and storytelling as a means to access that space. Originally from Waterbury, CT, she works with collaborators in formerly industrial cities ranging from the Northeast US to the North of England, to intervene in civic systems formed by extractive economies. Crean’s practice investigates how history is recorded and what can be read from evidence left behind in contested sites, that include the historical archive, the built environment, or one’s own body.

Crean is an Associate Professor of Art, Media, and Technology at Parsons School of Design. She has received commissions from Art in General, NY; Artspace, New Haven; and FACT Liverpool; fellowships from Creative Capital, Franklin Furnace, and A Blade of Grass; residencies from NYC Public Artist in Residence program (PAIR) and KODA; and participated in exhibitions at The New Museum of Art, NY; Southern Exposure, CA; and No Longer Empty, NY.