Remains
By stopping myself from taking the bags of shredded paper to the curb, an instinctive and deeply personal response occurred and an installation work emerged. My collage instincts to explore and manipulate printed material took over. The receipts, tax statements, bank statements, and insurances produced an abundance of thin strips of printed-paper history, representing lives on paper. Recently we've witnessed the fragility of a system that tens to fail people of colour, yet the bureaucracy of death of this same system imposes obligations from beyond the grave, further complicating the feelings of grief. This movement through loss over the years through an artistic presentation has been comforting, healing and haunting at the same time. REMAINS is the final transformation of the grieving process. From Death&Taxes the physical remnants, the paper strips, were burned and encased in their final transparent forms.
By stopping myself from taking the bags of shredded paper to the curb, an instinctive and deeply personal response occurred and an installation work emerged. My collage instincts to explore and manipulate printed material took over. The receipts, tax statements, bank statements, and insurances produced an abundance of thin strips of printed-paper history, representing lives on paper. Recently we've witnessed the fragility of a system that tens to fail people of colour, yet the bureaucracy of death of this same system imposes obligations from beyond the grave, further complicating the feelings of grief. This movement through loss over the years through an artistic presentation has been comforting, healing and haunting at the same time. REMAINS is the final transformation of the grieving process. From Death&Taxes the physical remnants, the paper strips, were burned and encased in their final transparent forms.
Melanie Garcia Melanie Garcia is a Filipino / Canadian artist and costumer for film. Her mixed-media works are concerned with unconscious spaces, the distortions of the human body, and the spaces the body occupies. Her works have been exhibited in Canada, Netherlands, Iceland, and Norway. When not pushing around little pieces of paper, Melanie offers art workshops to youth in and around Tiohtia ke/Montreal. |