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Urban shots >> A new exhibit at the MAC showcases the photography of Melvin Charney
Mirror: The
first part of the exhibition consists of black and white photographs
of Montreal, Quebec, Greece,Turkey
and the Canadian Prairies. Tell me about these. Melvin Charney:
This is a representative selection of photographs, most of which date
from the early 1960s. They look at ordinary places and buildings and
expose the human mentality behind the built forms around us. All are
single uncropped views. Eventually, I found one image just didn’t
work. We have a cinematic view—our eyes don’t stare fixed,
we scan. I began to build up images through series of photographs taken
around a subject. I first went the route of the traditional panorama,
for example in the piece “The Main” that is in the exhibition. M: The forerunner
of your assembled photographs. MC: It took
me a few years to figure exactly out what I was on to. If you look at
the series The White City Revisited, it deals with modern buildings
that are falling apart. It is generally difficult to photograph buildings
from the street so I began to assemble a series of uncropped photographs
to go beyond the perspective views of buildings. I’m not into photographing
buildings… I’m photographing buildings as extensions of the
human sense of self. M: And also
trees? MC: I’ve
been looking at trees very carefully for a number of years. For me looking
is photographing. Again I found it very unsatisfactory just pulling
back and taking an image of a tree. In the assembled photographs, I
allow the trees to grow into themselves, I stretch them and slot in
pieces that aren’t there. M: The exhibit
also includes a large selection of your painted photographs. MC: The
first painted photos are based on images I produced; I then began to
work with images appropriated from the newspapers. There is a violent
aspect to newspaper images. We see more than we are told. I imagine
apparitions that reveal what is going on and draw them onto the surface
of the photographs. These images are concerned with living through the
moment. Sometimes they even seem to predict future events: such as the
image of the bank president with the painted building flying out of
his hand. This work preceded the bankruptcy of Olympia and York by two
years. That building was the first one they lost… artist as shaman. M: The final
section of the show looks at the use of photographs in the creation
of your public artworks. I laugh when I look at the work “CITIES
ON THE RUN,” can you tell me about that? MC: Public
art is art in a public place, and here the public place is a tabletop.
This work grew out of a situation that developed when I was asked to
propose a public art piece for a new town in France. They forgot to
check with the urban planners, so I was left searching fruitlessly for
a location and turned the search into the artwork. M: What
do you like about this compilation of your work? MC: It allowed me to dig back in some of my earlier work and move forward in a way that has not been done before, thereby seeing a facet of my work that has previously been neglected. : Melvin Charney
shows at the MAC
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Montreal artist
Melvin Charney is best known for projects like the Canadian Centre for
Architecture’s sculpture gallery and other urban, outdoor art.
But his range extends to photography as well, as a new major exhibition
which opens this week at the Musée d’art contemporain reveals.
The Mirror spoke to Charney about this important retrospective.