BIZARRE OBJECTS
Alli Melanson
25 Prince Edward Street
Installation view, BIZARRE OBJECTS, Alli Melanson, City, 25 Prince Edward Street, 2025
Non plus (The “Matrix” 1), Digital print. 600 x 850 mm, Edition of 3, 2025
Stream of Life 2, Live feed from a webcam inside the kitchen of “Dodo Pizza” pizzeria on Karl Marx street, Kursk, Russia, Dimensions variable, 2025
Untitled, Spotlight, shadow, Dimensions variable, 2025
Untitled, Spotlight, shadow, Dimensions variable, 2025
Installation view, BIZARRE OBJECTS, Alli Melanson, City, 25 Prince Edward Street, 2025
Installation view, BIZARRE OBJECTS, Alli Melanson, City, 25 Prince Edward Street, 2025
BIZARRE OBJECTS
Alli Melanson
22.03 – 06.04.25
City
25 Prince Edward Street
I would never go again. No way. And I would definitely not recommend it. So not to my taste. No. Like I wouldn’t tell someone, “oh go to Glasgow, go see this show”. No. You feel you could be anywhere. You could be anywhere. Yeah, it has nothing to do with Glasgow. Irrelevant to The City. I guess in a way Glasgow was a working industrial city. That would be the only sort of relationship that I could attribute to that. Yeah. The slight talk about Communism and the Soviet Union- I mean that’s the context, isn’t it? Yeah, that is. I don’t think that like- it’s the context but if you don’t know much about it, it’s also okay. There was definitely a narrative. The puppets are meant to be telling a story but I couldn’t get it. Yeah, it can be anything. You could attribute many things to it.
First impressions are that all these works are about labor- a lot of working, a lot of working little men turning wheels, making things happen. A lot of bells, a lot of clocks, so it’s giving like “Industrial Revolution”. Time’s ticking, gotta go to work, burn the coal. Manual, like manual labor. Very manly, lots of penises. So many penises. And the general movement of the whole thing is sort of back and forth or like round and round in this like Yeah, very sensual.
Oh, sensual though, doesn’t… I don’t feel like it’s worthy of the word sensual. More like erect. I don’t know how to explain it. Erect. And like, jerky. Yeah, very jerky, very erect and hard things, you know. Chains, metal, wheels. Cogs. A lot of repurposed toys. Everything seemed recycled. They feel like adult toys. Not in a sexual way, just like men who are bored.
The whole thing is guided by a recorded voice with a sort of Scottish accent. Was it? It was an accent. It was a Scottish accent. It wasn’t a regular…it wasn’t like… an American one. No, it wasn’t American. But it wasn’t Russian either. Why would it be…I just feel like it was… There was a sort of accent, but it wasn’t Russian. No, it isn’t Russian.
It’s meant to be this immersive experience, but it’s not immersive at all. It’s a carpeted room with dividing white walls… It’s like a rural, kind of basic gallery museum. Like it’s not DIY, but this funding they’re getting, it’s not going to the location. It’s institutional in a way that is very… janky, a bit shonky. Oh, like school. Yeah, like school. And it’s just like a gallery space. It’s not a theater. You know when you go to class in elementary school and there’s a science fair and then you walk around all the different experiments? That’s what it was like. And they were all plugged. It’s like I said, the people at the front press play and then there were all these electronic sequences and switches going on at their respective times. There was no human intervention or, it feels like there hasn’t been any human intervention in a long time.
Photo credit: Max Slaven