Melissa Clarke is a Brooklyn NY based intermedia artist; she was born in Syracuse NY. Her work has exhibited at places such as the Queens Museum Gallery at Bullova Center, Issue project Room and Dixon Place.
The range of Clarke's interests can be seen in her work, including many interdisciplinary collaborations in fields as variable as geophysics, film, to experimental theater. Her audio-visual works such as snohole, and her recent series exploring insects, sweeteners, and other materials often found on the sites of historic battle fields along American Eastern rivers, the Intractable Journey, they are similarly created with audio, video, and still material captured on location, as well as material created in the studio by digital and analogue means. With reference to literature, history, science, introspection and curiosity, her work delves into the physicality beneath the narrative, often in unresolved perceptually fluctuating moments and with conceptually divergent meanings. The work is often poetic and lyrical while also succinct and efficient in scope; appearing mysterious and enigmatic yet clear in delivery and honed aesthetically evoking the experience of being in place and time with seemingly infinite transitions, emerging without protagonists one explores a shifting place of ordinary to other-worldly matter activated somewhere between sense memory and temporal traces of physical events.
About Clarke's Video: "The first scene,'Moocha: I have a fly on my plate,' begins with a video of a lone diner, half-heartedly involved in following the commands of her physical appetite. Slowly, she is joined by a lone fly, who moves from becoming a curiosity, to a pest to a distraction, to a true obsession. Supporting this movement are sharp, jarring cuts in the video. Watching these almost slasher-flick edits, we wonder whether this woman, who is lost and without control over self, will be able to exert the ultimate control over another."
DC Theatre Scene Review: Pebble-and-Cart Cycle July 21, 2009, by Anna Brungardt
About Clarke's Video: "Two [such] films are shown throughout the piece, both of which could occupy the rest of this review with their own merited analyses. The piece launches from this filmic core."
Washington City Paper Review: Hip Shot: Pebble-and-Cart Cycle: one-line tragedies by Chris Swanson, 19, 2009
About Clarke's Video: "Moocha: I have a fly on my plate" - is essentially a video installation that sets the tone for the entire cycle."
Acoustic Imaging: Upper NY Harbor exhibits in May 2009
(as part of the collaborative Installation: Underfoot in Constant Motion
w/ Ben Owen & Shimpei Takeda.)
May 2009, The Frying Pan, Curated by Suzanne Thorpe
Sponsored by the Electronic Music Foundation
Pier 66 Maritime, Hudson River Park
West Side Highway at 26th Street, New York City
auto show day of the dead
Video by Melissa Clarke
Developed through a collaborative effort w/
Barge Recordings: The Fun Years
Snohole exhibits in Spring 2008
475 KENT Lives, organized by independent curator Koan-Jeff Baysa, and coordinated by artist Lisa Mordhorst (both 475 Kent residents) and the Queens Museum of Art, opens April 9 at the QMA Gallery at the Bulova Coporate Center in Jackson Heights, Queens.
Developed through a collaborative effort w/
Terra Incognita Theater Company
May 23 and 24th 8:00pm
Dixon Place, 258 Bowery NYC, Tickets $15
Conceived and Directed by Polina Klimovitskaya
Video and Sound Art by Melissa Clarke
Puppets by Jessica Scott
with Jeremy Goren, Natalia Krasnova, Ellen Lanese
Michael Moscoso, Anthony Spaldo and Dolly Williams
Produced by David Djambazov and Joe Rosato
