Dive into the World of Gossip

Published by: Lee-Ann Joy | 21-Feb-2019
Let's talk about Melanie Jame Wolf, an artist with over ten years' experience in theatre and performance who has debuted at The Substation with her first solo exhibition called CHORUS, emerging a new stream of creative energy into video installation.
The underlying theme of CHORUS is the power of rumour and gossip, set against a mythological landscape of Ancient Greek theatre and pop idioms of mythic personas expressed through the ideas of drag to intertwine words and performance into a collective narrative that is seductive, edgy, humorous, captivating, yet, always purposely ambiguous.

CHORUS extends over five galleries and different personas inhabit different spaces creating a stage for the viewer to enter and listen to gossip and rumours without ever hearing any specifics of the juicy details, the more this occurs, the more you are drawn into their world and captivated by their power of suggestion and innuendo.

Melanie Jame's text and sound fuel her video installations and draw parallels to contemporary politics. A politician's dialogue is often false and untrue, making way for the politics of rumour and gossip to become the main empowerment and currency in the economy of politics rather than in the importance of policy.

In the same theatrical tactics of our current day politicians, the personas in CHORUS compete against one another's personalities to who is the most captivating and compelling, inadvertently branding themselves in a game of identity politics to sway and seduce the public to cast their votes.

Chorus is humorous and relevant in today's world of increasingly fragmented identity politics, fake news and our decreasing ability to decipher truth from fiction within social frameworks of dishonesty.

CHORUS is at The Substation 1 Market Street, Newport until March 12 and is open Tuesday to Saturday 11 - 5 pm.

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