Melanie Smith

The word vanishing hardly leaps to mind with regard to Mexico City. As the largest metropolis in the Western Hemisphere, it has engulfed the surrounding countryside with exponential prodigiousness. But perhaps that unchecked sprawl threatens, precisely, to undermine our image of the city, swelled so excessively as to prevent any perspective on its contours. Melanie Smith’s varied body of work gives back Mexico City some of its dimensions, both human and architectural, even as it conveys the alienation and anonymity intrinsic to the city’s enormousness. Her series of acrylic “Vanishing Landscapes,” 2005–2006, perhaps allegorizes the vexing attempt to bring the city into focus, while her video Spiral City, 2002, presents a circling, aerial view of uniform city blocks, animated only by the procession of vehicles. The video’s title nods to Robert Smithson’s 1970 film on Spiral Jetty and its attention to the question of entropy, though here it is the urban environment that appears subjected to the second law of thermodynamics, rendered a ruin even as it is inhabited.

In an adjoining room, a series of photographs and videos presents the obverse (both spatially and conceptually) of these disorienting, dehumanized cityscapes. Rather than the cold, gray geometry of infinite apartment blocks, we find the interior of a travel agency at once bright and sour, a department store brimming with commodities and shoppers, and outtakes from an aerobic class and its endearingly awkward choreography. It is, in part, her status as an outsider looking in that has afforded Smith’s incisive view––at once sympathetic yet still curious––of “El DF” (El Distrito Federal), as its denizens call it. If, as an immeasurable whole, Mexico City is vanishing because of its near ubiquity, Smith’s work materializes some of its irreducible particulars with a quirky and endearing pathos.