NYAB Event - Dawn Mellor "A Curse on Your Walls"

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At Team Gallery
Media: Painting

Dawn Mellor’s,London-based artist, latest exhibition will be made up of two bodies of work — the first is a cycle of paintings that depict Dorothy Gale from The Wizard of Oz in a variety of politicized and confrontational situations; the second is a portrait gallery of world figures entitled Vile Affections.

For all their imagistic solidity, Mellor’s new paintings refuse to tie everything up, to present us with a tidy package of form and meaning. Exactly what does Dorothy represent? She’s even more cryptic here as a symbol than in the 1939 film. Is she a refugee? A revolutionary? An every-man? A gay mascot? Does Mellor employ her as an archetype of Americana? Is she intended as a specimen of innocence preserved? Mellor’s point is to engage in the asking of these questions, not to provide pat answers for them.

The second gallery space at Team will be used to introduce New York to Mellor’s ongoing Vile Affections project, which has already been shown extensively in the UK. This growing portrait gallery represents a wide assortment of figures: Mother Theresa, Amanda LePore, Morrissey, Tony Blair, Janet Leigh, Karl Lagerfeld, and Margaret Thatcher, among them. All of them have been (to put it mildly) knocked off their pedestals.

It is uncomfortable to watch our icons, both popular and political, be toyed with, mocked, even desecrated. We might want to turn away, yet we can’t help but gawk. Mellor’s paintings are too beautifully rendered, and their helter-skelter content too intriguingly strange, for us not to look. We find ourselves transfixed by a zombie version of Dorothy, a drowning Hillary Clinton, a bearded Nicole Kidman, an eyeless Michael Jackson, like exhibits from a ramshackle circus side-show. The psychological warfare Mellor inflicts on these idols — and by extension, on the viewer who reveres them — transforms our fascination with their celebrity through the guilty pleasure of our disgust.

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