It is an enormous pleasure for IFB to invite you to the opening of a solo show by the phenomenal British artist Bod Mellor.
Please Join us}}}
Bod Mellor
Phoenix Compensatory Rest Center
Opening
Saturday April 11
4 - 7 Pm
We were thinking about trying to get away in our Superstar hot pants, watching the detectives…
PART I
When we got hailed by the policewoman, we got hailed by our own prospective cab.
“Hey, You There!”
We turned around.
Oh Shit, we thought, that cab’s going uptown.
(like the cab, we were in NYC, but unlike the cab, we were going downtown).
So we turned around again.
But the policewoman was just a taxi cab with a policewoman in it.
She was working on the job for dramatic effect and due to economic factors.
It passed, and we were no more. To her, we were a passing fare; to ourselves regarding her authority and motion, we might have been a part of a larger bust-up.
She proceeded onward. Krishna, the policewoman thinks,
What do I have to do to get a good ride in this city?
It’s been a long time … Not since ‘11 when I was putting those Wall Street 99% in handcuffs…
Stuff’s got tougher since then, my touch’s got stiffer…
Since then, I’ve just been putting them away…
She thought, feeling her waistband after eight post-shift beers.
Still without a wife… Still, I’m beside it all…
To distract from her work, she checks her appearance in the rear-view mirror.
She swerves to avoid like ten teenagers murdering themselves in Yorkshire. She puts her hand in her hair, it comes out gloppy.
Check herself out in the rear-view green screen.
PART II
Superstar gets the impression that the supreme being (BOD) or artist, or Bod Mellor, wants to dominate the portly policewoman character in a visual medley (commentary) upon state-issued power and, potentially, a kind of horniness for their visual austerity.
Superintendent Edwards (Felicity Montagu), Police Constable Mel Draper (Katy Kavanagh) Chief Inspector Garner (Joanna Scanlan), Police Constable Harriet Finch (Katherine Dow Blyton), the list goes on: a Fortnite skin painted en plein air, stretched to encase the four humours (sanguine, choleric, melancholic, and phlegmatic) that come together to make just the one irony:
Feminised crime-fighting resilience.
What do female policewomen, the MTV Awards “Sliming” tradition and conceptual painting have in common? They are never the main characters of their own story due to their aesthetic disadvantages, and are often involved in demonstrations of power play (against) gender norms.
In the world of the exhibition - works are assembled as if on the walls of an escape room that is crime-themed. Generic, kitschy, above all - big time signifying - intended to aid the escapees in their atmospheric experience.
Mellor does defile their stars and starlets with a semenical substance recalling the green ooze that MTV celebs are covered in.. In each painting, the policewoman is getting wrecked by the painter - they are getting stuff all over their face like messy, naughty sluts. It’s so humiliating when cum is in your hair.
And it's horrifying when cum remains in your unwashed hair thick with cig smoke from solving crime. These cops are alter egos, furnishing the SAW trap of the cop shop that one must enter in order to police the legality of your own femininity.
Theoretical painting is rlly hard to do. Mellor’s schizo approach to the various alter egos - embodied painting as a fictional subject is a new one and maybe actually quite a welcome relinquishing of power from the hand of the artist.
Although, bearing all of that in mind: an ejaculate onto the power-that-be’s face, whether through camouflage patterned twigs, blood boils and meatballs, reeds, slime and ectoplasm, is quite a nice way of expressing affection for someone. Especially when that someone is yourself. End on a nice note.
PART III
I hope that everyone I have invited turns up late. I’m not ready, I’m shooting things off, they stick in the walls, make marks .
Top of my tower, I have to open the trap door to see down the middle; check the rope ladder where they are swinging pinpricks a long way down.
Make a cup of tea, check the weather outside, it’s green blankness on the ITV outside.
They arrive to inspect my inspector’s hut.
My Guests Hello.
I only invited the women who smelt the most when they crushed my head between their thighs.
And now when they are up here all together…
Drinking tea and squash and having milk with beer and all of them farting discreetly at once.
I’m a bad guest in this girl’s house… They think in their own nefarious way.
I’m so sick of this. They said, all piling in, continuously, after the advert break.
One of them trips a trap and the inspector’s hut starts to revolve, the centrifugal force pushes all the leaking would-be policewoman to their gleeful mutual edge.
The whole thing spinning like Some Guy discovering action painting, duh.
Text by
Eileen Slightly and Sydney Sweeney - editors of Hollywood Superstar Review
The show is kindly supported by:
The Danish Arts Foundation - The Augustinus Foundation -15. June Foundation - Knud Højgaards Fond - Silkeborg Municipality
Institut Funder Bakke
Æbeløvej 20
8600 Silkeborg
Denmark
Institutfunderbakke.com
Open Saturdays and Sundays 12 - 4pm and by appointment
IFB has step-free access.
If you have questions please feel free to contact us institutfunderbakke@gmail.com