Opening Reception: Friday, August 3

5:00 – 7:00 p.m. at the Museum

Free with Membership or Museum Admission

Mel Chin: High, Low and In Between

Friday, July 27 – Sunday, November 25, 2012

EAST WING, FIRST FLOOR GALLERY

The Museum is pleased to present a special installation of The Funk & Wag from A to Z and several other works exploring the artist’s meditations on war, religion, and politics. Recognized as an important artist of our time, Mel Chin’s work evades easy classification. Analytical and poetic, he conjoins cross-cultural aesthetics with complex ideas. His investigations explore our natural and social ecology and the ways art can provoke greater social awareness and responsibility. Mel Chin: High, Low and In Between features The Funk & Wag from A to Z, originally curated by Ann Harithas for the Nave Museum in Victoria, TX, alongside new configurations of Chin’s recent works that highlight contemporary Surrealism and large-scale assemblage.

In The Funk & Wag from A to Z, Chin extracts images from all 25 volumes of the 1953 Funk & Wagnall’s Encyclopedia and reconfigures them as collages, unleashing the potentiality of images trapped by historical context. Through Chin’s creation of over five hundred dramatic, black and white collages, specially re-installed for the Asheville Art Museum, compelling new political and psychological associations emerge to confound and inspire.