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Robert Melton catalog essay by Hannah Wong: It's cliche, but as a child, Robert Melton dreamt of flying. "Who doesn't want to fly?" he asked of me. Indeed, the three pieces included in this show look upward & use clouds, the moon, a roof & fluttering trees as subject matter. In Peng! (2008) a stream of grey & white clouds usher in a black night sky & a fantastic journey of the moon. Give Up, or Die Trying (2008) scans a cloudless sky through a fluttering tree & How to Suffocate a Fire (2008) gradually focuses on the trunk of a tree against a blue sky. Much like looking out a window & dreaming of flight, Melton's work is quietly captivating. There is a beauty in the textures of the shaking leaves & chiaroscuro clouds as well as in the crisp, saturated colors. The overall visual narratives are slow, steady & spacious. Elements such as flickering leaves & cloudy skies, the artist's appeal to the eye & even the punch line in Peng! could easily be as cliche as the dream of flying. Yet Melton makes seemingly simple, everyday subject matter engrossing. The format of these time-lapse videos, pieced together with thousands of photographs (2,500 shots in the case of Give Up & How to Suffocate), simultaneously provides viewers the comfort of quasi-omniscience (one can see three hours worth of real-time action in just a minute & a half) along with the feeling that one, quite literally, is not seeing the whole picture. While unfolding the beauty of something familiar, Melton challenges human perspective. The moon bounces & we stand still, or so it seems. Melton had a less common childhood dream that one day gravity would suddenly disappear & humans, unhitched from the earth, would "fall" heavenward. In this, the dream of flying & the nightmare of leaving earth are effectually the same & this conflation appears in his work. In Give Up & How to Suffocate, a gusting wind, which Melton illustrates with whipping sounds & frantically waving branches & leaves, threatens to "liberate" everything within the frame, sucking elements skyward from the ground. The living characters in these works -- trees, leaves & branches -- are in "danger" both of flying & of losing themselves. So, too, is the viewer in danger; & that may be the point, as in Give Up. Despite slowly panning away from the jittering branches to the corner of the rooftop, which sails into the frame slow & steady, Melton returns viewers back to the world of rushing wind & chaotic life. All the while, he provides no horizon line for the viewer's comfort. In Give Up, the artist moves us from sounds like the loud rush of waves to the duller, softer roar of the ocean in a seashell & then back again. In Melton's work, dualities & conflations such as threat & safety, dream & nightmare, clarity & uncertainty, allow the artist & viewer to rise above cliche. Untied from our perspectival moorings, we can revisit the familiar from different angles in the heavens. |
