NYAB Event - Sean Mellyn “Optic Nerve”

Sean Mellyn “Optic Nerve”

Underline Gallery

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UNDERLINE Gallery presents a major retrospective of the prints and multiples of Sean Mellyn. Spanning twenty years of involvement and exploration in a broad range of media, the exhibition encapsulates many of the signature themes of Mellyn’s career. What emerges very strongly from assembling the works that utilize forms of mechanical production is a deepened understanding of Mellyn’s ongoing fascination with issues of seeing and of being seen. It is this emphasis that generates the exhibition title – Optic Nerve.

From a 1993 drypoint, Boy In The Bubble, to two new digital prints created to celebrate the exhibition – Tour Group and What Has Been Built(?) – the artist’s innovative utilization of a broad range of printmaking techniques will be on view. Commenting on the various modes of editioning, Mellyn writes:

There seems to be a pecking order with perfection in print-making- Silkscreen being the most accident-prone and the now almost perfect digital techniques are flawless representations. I’ve been working on how to make accidents before the image is scanned, or to try and do something that will corrupt the file.

Mellyn has worked with such distinguished master printers as Jean-Yves Noblet, Jennifer Melby, Andre Ribuoli. Additionally, he was invited to create several editions at New Mexico’s Tamarind Institute, where he worked in collaboration with master lithographer Bill Lagattuta. One of the works he produced there, Boy With Mask, is included in a traveling exhibition and book celebrating Tamarind’s fiftieth anniversary. Among the significant print collections that have acquired prints by Sean Mellyn are New York’s Museum of Modern Art, The Whitney Museum of American Art, The New York Public Library and The Brooklyn Museum of Art.

While the current show encapsulates many of Mellyn’s major themes, his on-going concern with issues of vision – seeing and being seen; surveillance and paranoia; and art historical issues such as the cataracts in Monet’s eyes – emerges very clearly.

Mellyn notes:

I really started using eyes after 9/11 as it was clear that we would soon become a people watched. I always thought it’s so ironic that reality tv shows would be such a big deal; that its less Warholian 15 minutes of fame, and more scrutiny in government – judgement- busted kind of way.

Optic Nerve: The Prints and Multiples of Sean Mellyn (1993-2013) has been curated by Michael Steinberg, who, as a publisher, gallerist and collector, has had a long involvement with Sean Mellyn’s work.

Sean Mellyn’s work has been shown in numerous U.S. and international exhibitions and is included in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art (NY) the Whitney Museum of American Art (NY) Houston Museum of Fine Arts (TX) and the San Fransisco Museum of Modern Art (CA) among others. He teaches painting at the School of Visual Arts, lives in New York City and works in Brooklyn.