Mel Chin: Disparate Acts

Award-winning, internationally-acclaimed American artist Mel Chin opens the 2014-2015 season at Rowan University Art Gallery with “Disparate Acts,” an exhibition that showcases the artist’s diverse work through many forms and directions. The exhibit runs September 2 – November 1, 2014. An artist’s lecture will be held September 17 at 5:00 p.m. in Westby Hall Room 111, followed by a reception in the gallery until 7:30 p.m.

Mel Chin is an activist artist who, through his work, raises awareness of political and social injustices, inconsistencies, and the disparate acts of governments, regimes, and fanatical groups. Chin provokes deeper meaning with imagery that is infused with humor and irony inspired by philosophy, mythology, and poetry.

Curated by gallery director Mary Salvante, Disparate Acts focuses on work that questions the objectivity, reliability, and integrity of information, facts, and events when compromised and corrupted by political, social, or cultural agendas. The exhibition will traverse his process from conception to fabrication through the presentation of studies, drawings, and photographs.

Chin’s art, which is both analytical and poetic, evades easy classification. He is known for the broad range of approaches in his art, including works that require multi-disciplinary, collaborative teamwork and works that conjoin cross-cultural aesthetics with complex ideas.

The artist also insinuates art into unlikely places, including destroyed homes, toxic landfills, and even popular television, as a means of investigating how art can provoke greater social awareness and responsibility. His “Revival Field” (started in 1989) is an ongoing project, which has been a pioneer in the field of “green remediation” (the use of plants to remove toxic, heavy metals from the soil). From 1995-1998 he formed the GALA Committee, a collective that produced “In the Name of the Place,” a conceptual public art project conducted on American prime-time television. In “KNOWMAD,” Chin worked with software engineers to create a video game based on rug patterns of nomadic people facing cultural disappearance. His film, 9-11/9-11 - a hand-drawn, 24-minute joint Chilean/USA production - won the prestigious Pedro Sienna Award for Best Animation from Chile’s National Council for the Arts and Cultures in 2007.

Additionally, Chin promotes “works of art” that have the ultimate effect of benefiting science, as in “Revival Field,” and also in the recent Operation Paydirt/Fundred Dollar Bill Project, an attempt to make New Orleans a lead-safe city (see www.fundred.org.) These projects are consistent with a conceptual philosophy, which emphasizes the practice of art to include sculpting and bridging the natural and social ecology.