Melissa Grey  |  Appassionata

Melissa Grey  |  Colony

Craig Hultgren, ecello
Live recording, premiere, Birmingham New Music Festival, October 2015

Melissa Grey: I understand you perfectly

Performed by Gareth Davis, Bass Clarinet
Live recording.
Splendour. Amsterdam. June 2015

Melissa Grey: Hyperlocal

Composed by Melissa Grey for the Grey/Gray installation-performance event at The Winter Shack. Classon Ful-gate Community Garden, Brooklyn, New York. Curated by Alex Branch & Nicole Antebi. 2015.02.07 (world premiere). Within a SAD light environment, created by artist Colin Stearns, composer Melissa Grey performed this electronic soundscape, employing isochronic beats and sine waves designed to offer relief from winter's early dark days and to help listeners enter a dream state on a 40° F evening.

Melissa Grey: Grey Theta

Created by Melissa Grey (Benjolin) for the exhibition Michèle Lemieux / The whole and its parts. From Drawings to Animated Films. Exhibition curated by Angela Grauerholz.

September 21 - November 6 2016 
Centre de design de l'UQAM
1440, rue Sanguinet
Montréal, Québec
H2X 3X9

The work of Michèle Lemieux, illustrator of children’s books, animated filmmaker and educator, proposes a reflection on the representation of reality, time and the human condition. The exhibition The Whole and Its Parts: From Drawings to Animated Films invites the viewer to discover the visual experimentations, working methods and aesthetic of an exceptional artist, the director of films, the latest of which, Here and the Great Elsewhere, was produced at the National Film Board of Canada between 2010 and 2012 with a remarkable instrument, the pinscreen, invented in France by the filmmakers Alexandre Alexeïeff and Claire Parker during the 1930s. Thanks to an exceptional loan granted to the Canadian Cultural Centre by the CNC, the public will have the opportunity to see the instrument on which the world expert in this technique, Michèle Lemieux, works on in the NFB studios in Montreal, which also possesses one of the rare restored examples of a pinscreen. 

The images of the pins, shadows projected onto a white surface, are ephemeral. A fixed camera photographs each drawing, and then transmits it to a computer, which records the successive images produced by the tiny changes made to the support. Very malleable, the pin screen naturally lends itself to morphing one image into another but within the confines of a fixed frame. The exhibition aims to show the demands this screen of 240,000 black steel pins makes on its user and the metaphysical questions that it raises.

Beyond a reflection on the work of Michèle Lemieux and an introduction to her creative process, this exhibition hopes to open a wider debate beyond the use of drawing in art making, and in film animation in particular, and to address the implications of the use a tool as archaic as the pinscreen in contemporary art and design. The way the artist has been able to reveal the potential of a screen that at first glance is archaic and restrictive and simultaneously exploit the wealth of possibilities new technologies offer, highlights both the paradoxical nature of an instrument, which is as surprising as it is mysterious, and the contradictions inherent in artistic creation in the current context.

wonderblock