Hot Flash is a solo exhibition of ceramic sculpture, animation and drawing by Melanie Jackson, that brings together two bodies of recent work, Rouge Flambé and Spekyng Rybawdy, in a pair of installations across Exeter Phoenix’s two gallery spaces. Together, they present us with an assembly of conceptual nomads, drawn from medieval sculptures of dissent; to incendiary (colonial) trading histories; to a fascination with technoscience’s visions and chimeras.

Rouge Flambé links fire, flame and kiln to sun, water and earth. Suffused in a fiery-red glow and inhabiting an unforgivingly human landscape, Jackson’s ceramic beasts prance, preen and perform across the gallery space, reflecting and refusing the different narrative functions that humans project on to them. They are joined here by a strange new vision of life – a chimera conjured up by AI, generated through algorithmic worm holes bored through ceramic visual cultures, scraped from this reluctant and unwitting commons. Jackson’s
installation makes connections from sun worship to scorched earth; from the mediaeval bestiary to contemporary meme animals; from the red of shame and humiliation to the red of anger and defiance; to joy, luck and hope – the spectre of extinctions vying with small acts of resistance.

Spekyng Rybawdy rallies together an immersive procession of hybridised figures that jostle and jive, pleasure, fight and take flight across a transhistorical plane of existence. They are based on Mediaeval ‘Bawdy Badges’, small cast tin or lead alloy brooches that were mass-produced and sold along pilgrim routes, and at fairs and carnivals. Easily affordable, made by and for working people, they were part of a vast and profitable pan-European visual culture and trade. In contrast with Pilgrim Badges, their more pious Christian progenitors, they present persistent images of locomotion, and motility, farcical assemblages, dissolutions and transformations of gender and class. Here, they have been gathered as an assembly – rendered as closely observed animations, sculptures and paintings – an extravagant collective of social and sexual reproduction, joyfully rendered with absurdist, deflationary humour.
Having lost their shine and colour over the passage of time, Jackson has reimagined them with new colours based on the polychromatic spectral hues revealed by high-definition electron micrography – as used for imaging hormones and neurotransmitter crystals such as dopamine, serotonin, testosterone and oestrogen. Recently these have been theorised as being responsible for designating personality or ‘temperament’ types – reminiscent of the mediaeval theory of the four humours that regulate the body and the emotions – blood, yellow bile, black bile, and phlegm.

Throughout, Jackson presents a world of absurd and inventive beings, rich with humour, dissent, subversion, delight, hilarity, titillation and surprise. Her work opens up an important lineage of visual methods and vocabularies of resistance, and ways of imagining alternative power structures for self determination, as well as challenging ways such images may be used to uphold violences of control and exclusion.

The exhibition has been supported by the Royal College of Art and the University of Plymouth.

ADDITIONAL ACTIVITY

Exhibition Launch: Sat 15 February, 3–5pm, free.
Join the artist to celebrate the opening day of their new exhibition.

Artist’s Talk: Sat 22 Mar, 12.00pm, free (booking required).
Join the artist for an informal walk through the exhibition and discussion with Phoenix Gallery curator Matt Burrows.

About the artist:

Melanie Jackson (UK) is an artist and educator who works with modes of nonfiction storytelling through assemblages of sculpture, writing and moving image. She lives and works between London and the South West of England. Her work has a focus on bio-technologies, at shifting scales from the nanoscale to the planetary. There is a concern with abstractions and circulatory systems. Ur-formations. Polyphony. Exclusions. Intimacies. She draws out tales of excess and the absurd, and inventive ways of getting by. The gallery is used to stage different tactics of representation: mimicry, documentary, myth fabrication, science, performance, humour, animation, political commentary, music, installation, craft and the cultivation of aesthetic delight.

https://melaniejackson.net