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SouthwestNET: Melinda Bergman

Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art

January 30-April 27, 2008

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The twelfth in the Museum's 'southwestNET' series, this exhibition features a new installation by Phoenix-based artist Melinda (Mel) Bergman. Bergman creates a disarmingly simple dream-world populated with fairy-tale figures. She creates environments populated with delicate characters, absurd architecture and mysterious relationships. There is an underlying menace to the works, however, one triggered by the creeping, rhizome-like forms and jittery edges of her characters. What is misleading about these softly colored works--figures are often dewy-pink or baby-boy-blue, dusted lightly with powdered sunlight-is that they hide a deeply personal critique of our ever-clogged commercial world. By emptying this landscape of its clutter, Bergman allows individuals to sort out what is left. In his book The Uses of Enchantment, child psychologist Bruno Bettelheim analyses how fairy tales help liberate children's minds while serving society by imparting social behavior as well. Indeed, her works acknowledge a painting tradition that includes the surreal painted landscapes of Giorgio de Chirico, whose melting objects and sun-baked architecture described a world gone mad, and a sculptural tradition represented by Claes Oldenburg, whose soft sculptures of everyday objects played between the urban detritus left after WW II and the newly-minted American Camelot of the 1960s. Bergman also references structures from scientific experiments, outdoor topiary and contemporary politics that inform her subtle, but sophisticated, critique of contemporary life. Bergman paints recurring images-pilgrims with purses, broken freeway overpasses that lead nowhere, smoke stacks fueling institutions of containment-that populate the two-dimensional plane. She scales up these painted figures into her sculptural installation where their alienation is made more apparent by the sparsely inhabited space. In her recent installations, Bergman has made complicated networks of interconnected molecules made of bleached wood and dowels and often ending in stripped, bandaged trees to comment on how denatured nature has become. For her first one-person museum exhibition Bergman has proposed creating a new sculptural installation with paintings. She will use car parts cut from commercials as characters. Bergman is taking her interest in the cross-over of nature and culture to its farthest limit, and, like artists of the early twentieth century who began charting how the human body would change in light of machines, Bergman takes this thought to its logical extreme.

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  Tickets: $7/Adults, $5/Students, Free Admission for Children Under 12

• Dates & Times

  Dates:
  January 30-April 27, 2008

  Times:
  Tuesday-Wednesday 10:00am-5:00pm, Thursday-Saturday 10:00am-8:00pm, Sunday 12:00pm-5:00pm

• Venue Info

  Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art

  7374 East Second Street Scottsdale, AZ 85251

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  Scottsdale

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