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During
her travels Melinda Schawel developed a habit of trawling
book stores and flea markets, unearthing bundles of
old correspondence, most of which was in languages
unfamiliar to her. She found these old forgotten letters
and postcards to be poignant and unsettling, and inspiration
for this recent body of works, out of touch.
In an image saturated society Schawels works
gives the viewer welcome relief with its subtle
shifts of light and shape. There is a gentle melancholy
to these paintings that echo the words and evoke the
memories of long ago friendships.
When used as social or political statement text can
often alter our experience of the visual arts. However,
Schawel uses scraps of foreign text not only for its
aesthetic qualities, but to create her own visual
language, one that might serve as a bridge across
cultures when words alone cannot.
I
was standing at the bus stop when an elderly woman
approached and started chatting to me while I nodded
and smiled in what I hoped were the right places.
I
waited for a lull in the chatter to say es tut
mir leid, ich spreche nur ein bisschen Deutsch,
but it never came. The bus arrived a few minutes later,
so we bid each other a fond farewell. I boarded in
a daze wondering how I could actually participate
in an exchange without contributing or understanding
a single word.
It was one of many one-sided conversations I had when
I fi rst arrived in Zürich in 2001. I wasnt
an obvious foreigner; my fathers roots are German
and my mothers Slavic/Polish. Learning the language
would be intrinsic to understanding the culture in
which I was now immersed. The gaps or slippages that
occur in the learning process, both between and within
cultures, is the current focus of my work - what is
misinterpreted, misunderstood or simply left unsaid.
Melinda Schawel 2006
Born
in Illinois, USA, Melinda Schawel received a BA in
Fine Art and Communication from the University of
California Santa Barbara in 1993 and a Postgraduate
Degree in Printmaking from RMIT in 1996. She has exhibited
regularly since 1995 and has been selected for a number
of prestigious commissions including the Westin Hotel
and the Park Hyatt. Her work has been published by
Murtra Edicions in Spain and is represented in numerous
collections including the National Gallery of Australia
and the Royal Museum of Fine Art, Antwerp, Belgium.
This is her second solo exhibition at Flinders Lane
Gallery.
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