Material Evidence expands on the formal concerns and critical debates developed through Melissa Gordon's exhibition of the same name, following a joint residency with Spike Island and Spike Island Print Studio in Bristol, in the summer of 2013. The publication navigates through four concurrently exhibited and ongoing series (Structures for Viewing, Blow Up Modernists, The Daily News RIP, and Material Evidence).
This monograph contains a reprint of the early modernist play Collision by Mina Loy, a source that contextualizes Gordon's concern with spatial arrangements and pictorial staging. An essay by Marina Vishmidt reflects on the legacies of modernism and the particular politics of abstraction found within Gordon's practice, and the conversation between Spike Island's curator Marie-Anne McQuay and Gordon investigates how each new body of work stages a reconfiguration of histories, surfaces, and iconographies.
Published on the occasion of the eponymous exhibition at Spike Island in 2013.
Born 1981 in Boston, Melissa Gordon lives and works in London. Her work as a painter and printmaker follows the relationship between representation and abstraction, seeing and reading. The artist often enlarges details to reveal hidden structures, zooming in until textual or pictorial information is reduced to dots and lines. She draws on source material that might be considered by-products of history, of medium and of making: the grid structure of Modernist painting, the dot matrix of the silk screen and details from her own painting studio.
Melissa Gordon was the winner of the ABN AMRO Kunstprijs 2007 and the Royal Prize for Painting in the Netherlands in 2005, and studied at Rhode Island School of Design, Cooper Union in New York and De Ateliers in Amsterdam.
Recent exhibitions include Structures for Viewing at Marianne Boesky Gallery, NY (2012), Martin Gropius Bau, Berlin (2012), Art in the Parking Space at LAX Art, Los Angeles (2012) and Future Forward at The Temporary Stedelijk, Amsterdam (2011). Gordon co-edits LABOUR, a new independent publication on art and work with a feminist perspective with Marina Vishmidt.
