Contemporary Art in Context - Dawn Mellor, Artist.

This "Guest Lecture, Contemporary Art in Context" by Dawn Mellor, was an additional bonus lecture as part of the series given from visiting artists and art experts to the University of Hudderfield.

Dawn Mellor originally studied fine art at St Martins in the Field, London, and later, was admitted to the Royal College of Art to complete her BA (Hons) degree.  Dawn then studied and obtained her Masters degree at the RCA.

 PLEASE NOTE;   THE IMAGES BELOW ARE RECREATED WITH DAWN'S KIND PERMISSION (RECEIVED VERBALLY FOLLOWING THIS LECTURE),  FOR MY ACADEMIC RESEARCH DURING MY DEGREE STUDIES.  PLEASE DO NOT COPY OR RE-DISTRIBUTE.

Dawn's work generally looks at figures from public life.  She has created a series on celebrity and stardom, but instead of focusing on the glory and fame that celebrity produces,  she focuses on the darker side of these characters.
 For example of exhibition of 'The Conspirators' was actually based on figures of the elite in the art world.  

Another exhibition entitled "The Actress" is about Helen Mirren, but instead of looking at the "hopeful aristocratic" side that Helen seems to publicly aspire to, it actually looks at the somewhat degenerative "Soho based" side of her earlier works as an aspiring actress during her early works.

Dawn has had two recent exhibitions of particular note; -   One is at The Gallery Space, Southend, curated by Andrew Hunt.  Basically he wanted Dawn to look at the local area and connect it with style and images to Southend and produce a commission accordingly.  Very cleverly, Dawn thought deeply about this and "wondered what was the dumbest thing to look at" in Southend.  She chose to look at previous artists and actors from the region.  In particular Helen Mirren seemed a good source of material, as she has played in a number of Jean Genet's plays. (The Maids (French: Les Bonnes) is a play by the French dramatist Jean Genet). The early productions in Southend of "Two Maids" included Helen Mirren as the character Solange.  [Solange and Claire are two housemaids who construct elaborate sadomasochistic rituals when their mistress (Madame) is away from the house. The focus of their role-playing is the murder of 'Madame' and they take turns portraying both sides of the power divide. Their deliberate pace and devotion to detail guarantees that they always fail to actualize their fantasies by ceremoniously "killing" Madame. The play was adapted as a film in 1974 staring Glenda Jackson and Susanna York].
Helen Mirren has also played as the Queen and as Rosalind as well as Salange on stage, and various other archetypal female roles too, such as in the Prime Suspect series (for television) where she plays an orthodox role of 'the female detective'.    - Dawn cleverly "redressed"  Helen Mirren's character and re-clothed her up, as the French Maid 'Salange' from her early works during an original stage career début as an actress in Southend.  The fantasy of murder in the play, is also manipulated in Dawn's art work.  In particular, it is interesting that Helen Mirren seems in public to have an appearance and 'air' of a condescending attitude to background and her attitude towards Southend.  This is really brought forward in Dawn's paintings, and levels an identity to show that Helen is not actually from the aristocracy after all, that is at complete odds to perhaps the image portrayed to the public.

Dawn also imagines the role of Hellen Mirren 'murdering the Queen' (Dawn's own words), and has incorporated a punk-ish image of the 1970s and early 80s in another Mirren portait.
Furthermore, within Dawn's work, she also attacks the pseudo-intimacy of Helen Mirren as a child.  This is done by a kind of doodling with Tippex over Helen Mirren's childhood photographs of her, during her school days.  This particular show was called "What happened to Helen."

Dawn was keen to point out that she doesn't dislike Helen in anyway, but just wanted to create her image as an alter ego and which, is completely fictitious.

In the exhibition entitled the Austerians, this was set up during the escalation of newspaper reports of the poor rights of domestic workers in the United Kingdom. Within this exhibition, Dawn wanted to touch upon the issues of the day.  - The show was actually held in Amsterdam and was based on an 'irritated reaction' to the gallarist / curator,  and the actors who were used in order to portray the servants, were used to kind of represent a politicized way of showing the subordination issues that domestic workers actually face.

Dawn recognised the "austerity chic", which seemed to be taking hold as 'fashionable' at that time.  She used some of the artworks to also portray the art world's bourgeois - back-office elite, so that these individuals were portrayed wearing servants clothes in order to create a "pathetic kind of vintage porn" which aimed to ridicule and satirise those types of bureaucratic roles in the art world.  It was put particularly gratifying to satirise people like Andy Walhol and Lichtenstien and also re-image what the other bureaucracy and culture of an exaggerated people out of touch with the real world might look like.

Dawn grew up in an area to the south east of Manchester,  in Glossop during the 1980s. At a around the age of 13 to 16, Dawn developed a particular passion for drawing the character of Michael Jackson.  This was during a time when there were race riots, particularly in the early 80s, and as far as the television critic Mary Whitehouse was concerned, it was the influx of "Nasty" videos, that were to blame for these riots.  At the same time there was also reference to the Chief Constable of Greater Manchester Police fame, - one James Anderton (of note), and he seemed to the public as his almost 'religious' right to clean up the city to 'remove these mucky videos' (as he once called them).

Race riots and economic deprivation, and the overuse of police control on the disorder, (where lots of social commentary from an out of touch elite was also being generated), was blamed on these "nasty videos", and the "Video Nasties" was the biggest story of the day.  
So, enters Dawn, and her brilliant sketch book of Portraits, completed at a very early age and now turned in to  abook in it's own right....

 -  In essence, by drawing Michael Jackson and other black celebrities (where Dawn only had access to their images at that time, through newspaper and magazine articles); Dawn was trying to represent a view of apartheid and was extremely angry at the fact that apartheid and 'celebritization' was actually making money from the abuse of these black celebrities.

 At this tender age around 13-16, she was trying to make sense of all of this. But now, much later in her life, Dawn is perhaps now realising "it was more about her own ignorance of what was going on at the time" in her own mind, than in the ambiguity of Michael Jackson's innocence - on the one side, and his criminal perversions and displaced sexual repression (as we all found out much later) on the other.   (Dawn also mentioned in the lecture, - "that around then, [she] fancied Diana Ross too at that time", and I thoroughly applaud and support her for being so honest to all us in the lecture hall), but Michael Jackson had a cultural greatness for "black celebrity" at that time which was far greater.

Dawn also mentioned that at that adolescent age [13-16 or so], she had made drawings of other male pin-ups, that she used to make connections with and in order to help her mix with other girls.  (It was interesting to hear Dawn explain that this wonderful use of her drawing skills was sometimes used as a vehicle to "overcome"... (I detect with some really human shyness),  as she put it,  as a result of perhaps ..."her mixed up sexually repressed feelings" of making friends with other girls.

Dawn's process of making portraiture, but then by adding some sort of 'visceral' layer [visceral was a word used by on of our lecturers, - and it is generally used to describe something akin to the outside layer of a bodily organ], which tends to be added after the original portrait and accurate likenesses been obtained, is extremely interesting.  Dawn answered the question directly in that "the added layer of visceral imagery is not an inbuilt or felt hatred, it is something very different, - almost childish" as she put it.
In reflection, I found that Dawn's honesty and courage in her work was incredibly interesting and her comments highly articulate, - I thoroughly enjoyed her lecture with the hope of meeting her again sometime.   - Not only is her work readily very skilful at an artistic level,  but it also has a humour injected into the subject matter (which, while some people may find offensive, I found very skillful, clever and genuine).  My in-depth reflection of this is that I think much of Dawn's work is intended to be used as a parody and as mild humour,  it opens up another angle, new questions and challenges the status quo, - which I particularly liked. - Nobody who has an adult, mature and open mind should be offended at all by any of her works.  She deserves the popularity and continued success for a very long time to come.

PLEASE NOTE;   THE IMAGES ABOVE ARE RECREATED WITH DAWN'S KIND PERMISSION (RECEIVED VERBALLY FOLLOWING THIS LECTURE),  FOR THIS, MY ACADEMIC RESEARCH BLOG, DURING MY DEGREE STUDIES.  PLEASE DO NOT COPY OR RE-DISTRIBUTE THEREFORE.