Zane Mellupe-Goutard // Google
Thinking of Not Ostriches – 2012
Zane Mellupe-Goutard as an artist deals in concept, social issues, and photography. She is based in Shanghai. Her work gives body to a similar effort in the reconceptualization of popular notions community and place, often taking a topic and bringing in other artists to pitch their own directive. Mellupe, the curator of eturuF, is the founder of WhyWhyArt.
Mellupe-Goutard pursues the multi-limbed manifestations of urban renewal in China’s modern reality – the objectives of developers, the city, communities, and individuals alike and, most importantly, what aspects are left unaddressed by the superordinate approach currently taken. Observing gentrification, regeneration, development, loss, and remediation through site-specific projects, Mellupe-Goutard constructs discussion. By inviting other artists, as a curator, and spurring the expression of community concern through creativity, as an artist, her product is collaboration. Her own contribution in this dialogue approaches the individual and the community in parallel observations. The clear distinction between these two spheres of her work evidences the artist’s unease with the process of urban renewal and the truncation of identity.
As a photographer and conceptual artist, Mellupe-Goutard’s work is deconstruction and the merger of elements and concepts inside images and words. The framing of an image or concept takes distinction in the lens as well as in exhibition and the selection, arrangement, and presentation of a series of related works. Mellupe contests the bounds of what photography is, or what concepts or representations it deals in, creating terminology and entropy. The viewer’s perception and method of reading an image is itself generative. The pursuit of re-assemblage through necessary parts is echoed in the social organization undertaken in ameliorating the process of urban regeneration. It’s unclear whether Mellupe-Goutard’s public activation naturally stemmed from her photographic work or if the daily work was an understood precursor to something with more direct alignment.
