Photography/Video/Performance Artist exploring psychogeography, identity and inner conflict.
Ghost House and Disciplinary Institutions shown at Traverse Video, Toulouse, France 7-11 March 2018.
Download full programme as pdf.
Disciplinary Institutions shown Thursday 8 March at opening screening, isdaT, 1:30-6:30pm (catalogue page 6).
Ghost House shown Sunday 11 March at closing screening, Musée des Abattoirs, 2-7pm (catalogue page 12).
Tricyclic Transform shown at Visions in the Nunnery exhibition at Nunnery Gallery, Bow Arts, 24-30 November.
It’s not every day you get to share the bill with Marina Abramović (or rather, Marina Abramović deigns to share the bill with you.. 😉 )
Part of Programme 2, running 24-30 November
Opening times: Tuesday – Sunday 10-5pm
Address: The Nunnery, 181 Bow Road, London E3 2SJ
Private view: Thursday 24, 6-9pm. Facebook event. | EventBrite.
I can’t make it to the private view but I’ll visit the exhibition on Saturday 26th around noon as I’ll be in London that day.
Visions in the Nunnery is a renowned showcase of contemporary moving image and performance work, returning to the Nunnery Gallery, London for a special celebratory tenth edition this October. Selected from over 1500 world-wide submissions, combined with a star-studded list of invited artists and previous exhibitors, the show will present a unique and exciting platform for cutting edge digital and performance art.
Excerpt from Program 2 Press Release:
Visions Programme 2 explores the diverse methods and approaches artists use to address theparadoxes, contradictions and possibilities of image-making and representation in a ‘post-digital world’. Often working with anod to processes and contexts of the recent past, work tackles the politics of identity, place, nostalgia and negotiating alternative world-views.
Melanie Menard, Ope Lori and Stacey Guthrie’s works focus on identity, sexuality, power, difference and the creation of alter-egos. In an attempt to negotiate gender roles, binary structures, inequality and performativity, the films use humour, theatricality and absurdity to draw attention to these moments of creation, destruction and equilibrium.
Tricyclic Tansform video shown at Instants Video, Marseilles (FR) & Milan (IT).
10-13 November 2016, La Cartonnerie, Marseilles, FR.
4-17 November, Videoart Project Space, Milan, Italy. Facebook event. | Website. | Evensi.
Exhibition Catalogue (my work on page 25)
I made a standalone interactive video webapp with AngularJS and Videogular.
A Live demo is now available, with a temporary video (a mute version of the Ghost House video) and random scenes. The creative side still needs to be done, I need to find an appropriate concept to use this code with: probably a journey into someone’s mind as they take decisions, or a maze of some sort.
If you’re into that sort of things 😉 you can find the code on bitbucket and a brief technical explanation here: I overlayed a UI layer made with Angular views and router on top of a HTML5 video powered by Videogular. The UI layer controller retrieves the scene structure (with start and stop timings) from a JSON file via a custom service and displays custom UI for each scene offering the user to go to various other scenes. When the user clicks on a UI element, the router goes to another scene and the UI controller dispatches an event saying the scene has changed. The video controller catches the event, plays the video sequence associated to the new scene, and dispatch an event at the end of the sequence.
This project has its own page under ‘Digital Media’ where updates will (very slowly) be posted.
Screening at the Cinema Museum on Saturday August 22nd at 19:30, part of the Gender Riot program of short films that explore, play, sing, dance, celebrate and experiment with gender.
The Cinema Museum
2 Dugard Way
London
SE11 4TH
Saturday 31 January 2014
DEEP TRASH ITALIA #4 Carnivalism
at Bethnal Green Working Men’s Club, East London
£6 adv. / £8 door
h 19:30-02:00 (last entry midnight)
Deep Trash Italia exhibition-cum-performance-club night pairs up with the start of the Carnival in Venice to transform Bethnal Green Working Men’s club into a babel of masquerades, paradoxes and non-sense to celebrate the disruptive forces of carnivalism.
Carnival is the breaking of norms. Carnival is the carnal; the colour, the mask, the garments and the feathers. Carnival is Commedia dell’Arte, role-play and delirium. Carnival is dressing up and being undressed. Profanity, paganism and anarchy. Carnival is the erotic, the celebration of death and the force of the life-drive.
Drums, bells and cellos announce the first ever event of the year where Venetian Carnival meets London-Punk, joined by Brasil-samba, Japan-Noh, together with Bollywood and Afro-tribalisms. What are the limits of fantasy when reality is chaos?
PERFORMANCES Sisters From Another Mister, Eleanor Fogg, Vivian Chinasa Ezugha, Pi The Mime, Vera Bremerton + Monsterlune Freak Show, Giulio Baistrocchi, Ellie Flory Fawcett and Haus of Sequana. VIDEOS Banfield-Rees, Colette Copeland, Melanie Menard. COSTUMES Designguise and Monsterlune. HOSTING Lewis Burton.
MUSIC (Main Room) Benedicta and SUGO, pump the beats of international hits, with a twist of Italian camp classics and carnival tunes from all over the world.
(Boudoir) Justine and Bamboo Hermann, dig into quirky techno music, experimental beats, dirty house with a touch of kawaiii.
Tickets can be purchased online at http://www.workersplaytime.net/TICKETS.htm
Facebook event at https://www.facebook.com/events/618527778253133
Organised by http://www.cuntemporary.org/
A draft cut of my ‘Tricyclic Transform’ video will play at Instants Video Festival in Marseilles (France). This year’s theme is ‘For a free circulation of bodies and desire’ (‘Pour une libre circulation des corps et des désirs’).
‘Tricyclic Transform’ will play on Saturday November 8th at 15h30, part of their gender-themed short film programme ‘Quel(s) genre(s) d’individus sommes-nous?’
‘Tricyclic Transform’ documents the creation and self-destruction of my ‘biologically-challenged drag-queen’ alter-ego Miss Liliane. ‘Tricyclic Transform’ theatricalizes the experience of being genderqueer: the character on screen tries to negotiate restrictive gender-roles by performing symbolic rituals, but the inability of their mind to comfortably inhabit any predefined role causes them to get trapped in an endless loop of repeated, pointless gestures. This mini-performance is a step towards a one-person musical cabaret show still in development.
Version Française:
‘Tricyclic Transform’ documente la création et l’auto-destruction de mon alter-ego “drag-queen biologiquement défaillante” Miss Liliane. “Tricyclic Transform” théatrâlise l’expérience d’être genderqueer: le personnage à l’écran essaie de négocier des roles de genre restrictifs par des rituels symboliques, mais l’incapacité de leur esprit d’habiter confortablement aucun rôle prédéfini les amène à se retrouver piégé dans une boucle sans fin de gestes inutiles et répétés. Cette mini-performance est une étape vers un spectacle solo de cabaret musical encore en développement.
*** Musicians wanted! ***
The video below is a draft cut and marked as ‘pending soundtrack’. The soundtrack is designed to be me singing ‘What makes a man a man’, but I’m held back by my complete inability to play an instrument.
If you are a musician (ideally a piano player, but anything goes, we can make it work together with a bit of creative thinking) into dark cabaret/jazz/queer performance, and interested in collaborating on video soundtracks and ultimately live performance, I’d love to hear from you!
*** Thank you! ***
I filmed and edited the trailer for Grégoire Aubert’s solo theatre show ‘Judy speaks’, based on the infamous confessional tapes Judy Garland recorded between 1961 and 1966.
Trailer for ‘Judy Speaks’ by Gregoire Aubert (short version) from Melanie Menard on Vimeo.
‘Disciplinary Institutions’ will play on Thursday August 1st at Duke’s at Komedia Brighton as part of the Brighton Pride 2013 Short Film Compilation. Screening starts at 18h30.
I am thrilled because, although my short films have already played on the big screen, it was at festivals abroad so I never got to see them myself, I only ever saw them on computer screens 🙂
I’m really hoping to be able to meet local independent filmmakers and performers on the night. If you are reading this post and you are a Brighton based underground film maker, an actor or performer, someone who does sound design or composes music, please come talk to me at the bar afterwards! The film selected for the festival is purely visual video art, but I’ve been (slowly 🙁 working on a new project for while. Thanks to the recent heatwave, I nearly finished reading ‘Visionary Film’ by P. Adams Sitney (that’s more than 400 pages of really hardcore reading!) on the beach, and it helped me a lot clarify my ideas. Another post to come on this once I manage to copy my notes scribbled in the margins onto the computer… However a narrative short, even a no budget experimental one like I want to do, is not something I can make on my own like purely visual video art. I need at least 3 performers and a sound person. I probably can manage the camera work and editing by myself, and just use natural lighting cleverly. So really, if you are a Brighton based film or performance person, and you like stuff like David Lynch (my film hero <3 ), Jack Smith, Kenneth Anger, 'The Blue Angel', Ingmar Bergman, Fassbinder, come talk to me! We could work together and make absolutely no money 🙂
I made the background video projections for Ken Mc Loone’s ‘In Capacity House’ show, after falling in love as a spectator with an earlier version of the show last year. You can catch the last run of the show on 16, 17, 18 May, 7.30 pm at the Regency Tavern, Brighton. This is the story of Miss Diagnosis, ‘alternative Glaswegian drag artist’, as she mourns her dreams of glory and rants at the people who destroyed them in the confines of her tiny studio flat… Bittersweet, poignant and full of dark humor…
This show bravely lays bare the inner workings of the human mind that we usually feel more comfortable ignoring. According to Ken, the writer/performer, the main theme is mental illness, but I believe it goes further: it is about everyday neurosis. Miss Diagnosis lies to herself and blames the whole world for her own shortcomings, but she is never presented as a freak, or someone to laugh at. Her story is told with empathy, through simple childhood memories and everyday moments everyone can empathize with. Deep, uncomfortable themes such as alienation and loneliness are treated with subtlety and a total lack of pretention: no big words or patronizing ‘messages’, just the raw portrayal of an ordinary individual’s lost hopes and coping mechanisms. We cannot help but recognize bits of Miss Diagnosis in ourselves: her self-delusions, her grandiose belief in her own superiority, her blaming others make us laugh, but a deeply uncomfortable laugh because we are forced to face that we react the same way on a daily basis, albeit in a less extreme manner.
If you want just another entertaining drag show, or ‘safe’ drama that reassuringly simplifies the world for you, that shows you characters with 3 easily identified goals and conflicts, and a linear plot ending in a moral and ‘worthy’ resolution, then this is probably not the show for you. If you are ready to be challenged, to sit for an hour in front of a mirror reflecting the less glorious parts of the human psyche, if you love the plays of Beckett or the films of Polanski, David Lynch, Neil Jordan, then go see it, there is nothing else quite like it at the Fringe.
As a teaser, the video I shot of Donald (Miss Diagnosis)’s mother talking to him. The performer says his part of the dialogue in real time, interacting with his memory of his mother.
mother at sink from Ken McLoone on Vimeo.
And his parents arguing (no live interacting with the memory on screen this time):