Mel Chin, Revisitation

Added: 2026-06-03

[00:00:04][music] >> We're in a storage room looking at some works in the Art Bridges Foundation collection and we're standing in front of four large paintings that together constitute a work by Mel Chin called Revisitacion. We're standing in a room where the four canvases are on three different walls, but they're meant to be seen together.

[00:00:30]>> For Mel Chin, the story of this work begins in the 1980s where in Port Bolivar, Texas, he experienced an epiphany and so this site was tremendously meaningful to him and he revisited the spot 40 years later and was struck by how much the coast had changed particularly as a result of the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill which devastated the ecology of the Gulf of Mexico.

[00:00:59]>> I can imagine how disturbing it must have been to go back and see this place so completely devastated. He talked about the smell of the oil. He talked about the water being stained. It must have been a very painful episode.

[00:01:15]>> The work offers a powerful example of the contradictions and pains of grappling with the very personal effects of climate change. We see him very cleverly using oil paint to talk about the effect of this oil spill and it's really extraordinary the way his painterly technique evokes the muddied, syrupy, viscous contamination.

[00:01:40]>> And what we're looking at with these large forms that occupy the center of all four of these canvases is the water molecule, two hydrogen atoms and one oxygen atom.

[00:01:51]>> And as we visit each of the four canvases, we see the water molecule undergoing different transformations and we see the changes wrought by human destruction.

[00:02:03]>> We have this triangle that looks like the jetty that looks like the rock wall extending out.

[00:02:10]>> And I'm also interested in the way that the jetty, the rocks, form a diagonal that recedes into space at the same time that we have these tiny little molecules that hardly exist in space. These contradictions that are brought together.

[00:02:26]>> Melchin has addressed that some of the inspiration for this piece is the tradition of Rajasthani tantric paintings. Paintings that are created as devotional aids, made in a meditative act, and then hung in a certain spot of the home or carried throughout the house again to aid in meditation. And I think that's a fascinating framework through which we can consider this piece. So, we know Melchin displayed this while still working on it, revisiting the canvas over and over in the same way that we might revisit an object for a photograph or something that holds memory as we revisit the memory. And so, more than a representation of a place, this I think is a canvas that invites us to revisit.

[00:03:15]So, if we move from the bottom left quadrant of the piece to the top left quadrant of the piece, the shape of the water molecule is now inverted, which might also >> call our attention to the fact that this whole piece is deeply symmetrical. So, as we look at this sort of inverted shape that we found below, behind it we notice these bulbous wispy shapes. They might at first appear to be clouds, but we might also interpret them as the contamination of the greenhouse gases, this smog that's wreaking the air.

[00:03:47]>> In this next canvas on the upper right, we see what the artist described as a superheated mass of boiling hot air.

[00:03:57]>> There's a sense that we're looking at some sort of gaseous explosion. And whereas the other canvases might register the sort of slow unfurling of contaminants over time, this quadrant seems to register a sense of instantaneous destruction.

[00:04:13]>> We've lost some of the outlines of the hydrogen and oxygen atoms that were so distinct in the other canvases. They're obscured by the sense of fire and darkness. And then the molecule in the lower left is made up of these beautiful swirling brushstrokes of paint that's been diluted. So we see the hand of the artist.

[00:04:35]>> Once our eyes fall on the bottom right quadrant, we're stuck in this eddying, swirling red water. It's almost biblical to me. And yet we have this mandorla shape that we find a little off-center, which the artist has referenced as alluding to the shape of a flounder that's commonly found in the Gulf of Mexico. So we have this pervading sense that even in all of this change and destruction, there also remains rebirth and regeneration. This shape also strikes me as yet another reference to those Rajasthani tantric paintings, which often use this mandorla shape as a sort of portal, as an entrance. And we have the triangle that mirrors the jetty that we saw at the beginning of the piece.

[00:05:21]>> I do feel as though I'm witnessing the end of the world, the end of time. In a way, Chin seems to be thinking more about the progress of time, of revisiting, of what time can do to reverse things. Maybe giving us a sense of hope.

[00:05:39]>> And I think so often art that deals with climate disasters, that deals with pollution, that deals with oil spills, that deals with climate change broadly, feels debilitating in the way it presents the bleak reality of the situation. And I think here, with this interplay between abstraction and figuration, with the symbolic use of the shape of the water molecule, with this hypnotic patterning of brushstrokes, Chin offers us a personal portal to contemplate this unfathomable change.

[00:06:13]And I think at the end of the day, when I read this at this canvas, it strikes me that the only law here is change.