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Zoe Mendelson
Biography
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Seven Ways to Dream (Valentines Day 1993)
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Zoë Mendelson creates seductive worlds. Her drawings, paintings and installations entice the viewer into an elaborate fantasy through intricately rendered imagery and embellishment. Drawn into the artist's world, you discover that idealised innocence and gentility act as a cover for erotic excess and the work exposes itself as being politely soiled. Overlapping opulent historical settings and objects with Vegas-style signage and lush flora, Mendelson deals with obsession and dreams. Evoking the acquisitive excesses of Victorian imperialists, her images take on the significance of relics, often gathered together and displayed in the environs of a false museum, entrapped within customised antique furniture and vitrines.
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Zoë Mendelson’s inconclusive narratives are historical fictions borne out of contemporary fantasies. They overflow with lavish and elegantly rendered details: meticulously drawn flora and fauna sit within theatrical architectural settings; repeated individual motifs such as disembodied hair or giant squid take on iconic significance.
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Wrapped Reverie
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Haiku Themepark
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Manners installation 2004
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Playing in this sumptuous, yet corrupted, period drama are female characters that remain hollowed out drawings. The girls' poses and expressions are drawn from the mechanical repertoire of adult entertainment and their emptiness allows a fantastical internal world to leak out. This internal world threatens to take over the girls entirely; the figures become entangled and hidden, or begin to morph into their own environments. Where incompatible cultures meet, these girls act as a vehicle for good-mannered femininity collapsing around them. The ultra-polite rubs shoulders with the decidedly lewd.
The artist uses drawing to communicate obsession, but the process in which she works enters into the compulsive; continually re-drawing elements until satisfied that the drawings appear flawless. With its conflicting roots in children’s book illustration, botanical and erotic drawing, this unsullied line becomes a method of containing furtive imaginings. Where pencil wall-drawings enrobe the architecture of a space there is fleetingness to the fantasy; these painstakingly elaborate tales are as temporary as the dreams themselves.
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Forthcoming Exhibitions:
September 2006: Wunderkammer, solo show, Galerie Schleicher + Lange, Paris
www.schleicherlange.com
October 2006: The Square Root of Drawing, Temple Bar Gallery, Dublin, Ireland
www.templebargallery.com
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Scatolollipop
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Forthcoming Publications:
August 2006:
Interview and works in 'Tokion' magazine, US and Japan
Interview and works in 'Tetu' magazine, France
July 2006:
Fondation Cartier artist’s commission for cover of 2007 Cartier diary
Essay commissioned for The Artists’ Yearbook 2007 published by Thames + Hudson
June 2006: Reproduction of works in Lovely Daze, issue two: Take a Stroll
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