Near Water (IRL Exhibition)
| Date | 07.28.17 |
| Time | 7pm–11pm |
| Format | |
| Medium | |
| Admission | Free |
| Event artist | |
| Presented by | |
| Funded by | |
| Associated Program | Welcome to my Homepage · IRL |
IRL and Welcome to my Homepage present the IRL exhibition Near Water by Melanie Clemmons.
Project Description
True crime communities flourish online, where strangers convene to moonlight as armchair detectives, proposing theories, discussing timelines, pouring over photo/video/audio evidence, and sleuthing through publicly available records. The desire to solve open investigations is paralleled by the impulse to learn as much as possible about them and often, the only information that is off limits to these internet investigators, is the experience of places themselves; the Ramsey basement, the Best Buy parking lot, the McCann holiday apartment. And in this field dictated by rationality and objectivity, psychic detectives are largely dismissed as resources due to their stigmatization as charlatans. Despite this skepticism, psychic detectives’ unconventional methods for divining information have had success in helping to solve cases.
In Near Water, Clemmons has adapted the established divination tool of a pendulum and have utilized real terrain data to re-create the Hudson Pecan Orchard in the Tara Grinstead case. Users are invited to wield the pendulum and traverse the space in an effort to meditate on her disappearance.
Melanie Clemmons’s secret hobby is true crime. She’s specifically interested in missing persons cases and the online communities that investigate them. For her Homepage residency, she created navigable environments from real terrain data of infamous crime scenes and a series of digital tools that can be used to divine for clues within the scene.
Artist Bio
Melanie Clemmons is an educator, live visualist, and new media artist. Her work has been shown at the Whitney Museum of American Art, Echo Park Film Center, Transfer Gallery, Denver Digerati, the Museum of Human Achievement, and many DIY spaces/venues throughout the US. She currently teaches Digital Art at the University of Colorado-Boulder, where she also coordinates the Interactive Art, Writing, and Performance program’s Visiting Artist Series. Melanie facilitates the Studio Project, a teen intern program at the Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art and performs live visuals as Vidkidz (http://www.vidkidz.info/) , with her collaborator Zak Loyd.
