MIAMI, FL.-Continuing its innovative collaboration with Miami Art Central (MAC@MAM), Miami Art Museum will present Melanie Smith with Rafael Ortega: Parres Trilogy, an examination of the urban experience in Mexico City, the artist’s adopted hometown. The three-part film series will make its U.S. debut alongside two other recent works. The exhibition will premiere on March 6, 2008 and will remain on view in MAM’s “New Works” focus gallery through June 29, 2008.

British-born Melanie Smith has spent nearly two decades engaged in an exploration of Mexico City. Since 1989, life in the world’s third largest urban center has profoundly impacted her work, which reflects the city’s tensions and intrinsic contradictions. Trained as a painter, Smith’s work also encompasses drawing, photography, installation, and video. Using colors, textures, materials, and found objects from the urban environment, Smith examines the complex and chaotic visual elements of the twenty-first century city. In her detailed investigations of Mexico City—from the air and from the ground, from the crowded grid of city blocks to the commerce on the street—Smith draws from the visual impact of the megalopolis, examining the ways in which abstraction relates to the urban environment.

“Melanie Smith’s visionary work explores the intersection between abstract art and the real, human experience of life in a contemporary city, something we strive to achieve in our exhibitions and programs at MAM,” said Terence Riley, Director of Miami Art Museum. “The MAC@MAM collaboration has already enjoyed great success this fall with the U.S. premiere of Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller: The Killing Machine and Other Stories 1995-2007, and we are pleased to continue to offer the public an exciting roster of contemporary programming.”

Parres Trilogy is a three-part film series developed in 2004 and 2005 with Rafael Ortega. Shot in the small town of Parres outside Mexico City, the films investigate sight and its obstruction – each by capturing a scene that is either hidden or uncovered by a “painting.” In Parres I, a man walks toward the camera from a nearby urban neighborhood. He picks up a can of spray paint and gradually coats the screen, obscuring the scene in the background. Parres II moves from a close-up shot of a woman’s blinking eye to a scene that is gradually masked, bleached by a heavy downpour of rain. In Parres III the film moves in reverse order–a muted gray painted screen is slowly wiped away by a window cleaner to reveal the noise and activity of the street. As a whole, the Parres Trilogy crystallize the artist’s concerns with the city—the defining setting of contemporary life—and our shared attempts to make sense of the world around us.

Additionally, the exhibition will present the paintings, Parres 10, (2007) and Negative Painting, (2008). Melanie Smith with Rafael Ortega: Parres Trilogy was curated by Rina Carvajal, MAM’s Adjunct Curator and Executive Director and Chief Curator at MAC. The exhibition will be accompanied by a brochure and an artist book, Parres (112 pp), edited by Turner Books, Mexico City, 2008.

Melanie Smith - Born in 1965, in Poole, England, Melanie Smith has been living and working in Mexico City since 1989. Her work has recently been exhibited at the Tate Britain and the Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego, as well as O.M.R Gallery in Zurich, Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia in Madrid, The Tamayo Museum of Contemporary Art in Mexico City, UCLA Hammer Museum in Los Angeles the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, and the Lab at Belmar in Lakewood, Colorado.