photo: Miklos Legrady
Melik Ohanian - Paris, France, New York, USA
El Agua de Niebla, 2008
Installation
5 - Bay Street & Queen Street West
[ photographs ] [ video ]
El Agua de Niebla is a giant hammock, hand-woven by several families from the Mayapán village
in Mexico employing traditional Mexican techniques. At his first meeting with the villagers, Melik Ohanian
explained his desire to offer a hammock to his father, a giant. Amused by this idea, the villagers met
daily in the town school over eight weeks to produce the equivalent of 44 regular hammocks.
Composed of 72,000 meters of thread, the hammock unfolds to 41 meters in length. The scale of the
traditional hammock is increased, thus creating a strange collective territory. The scale fascinates
viewers by its sheer size, poetry and dream inducing force, while the curved shape drawn by the weight
of the textile reveals an intrinsic force at work, that of gravity, which defines and shapes the piece.
Through this work the artist highlights the complexity of temporal intervals, which, in more or less
obvious ways, govern our relationship to the world and others.
El Agua De Niebla draws its name from the outstretched nets cast by farmers in the Chilean mountains,
used to collect water from clouds for crop irrigation.
Born in France in 1969, Melik Ohanian lives and works in Paris and New York. His work can be understood
in terms of physical and conceptual territories that focus on the concept of time. He has taken part
in a large number of solo and group shows around the world.
http://ommx.org
Courtesy of the artist and Galerie Chantal Crousel, Paris. © Melik Ohanian
|
