For her second show at this gallery, titled "Some Things You Are Not Allowed to Send Around the World," Melanie Jackson expanded her references from an exhibiting artist's brief use of a space to myriad other temporary occupations--here, those of migrant workers. She evoked their survival strategies and carefully brought their experiences into play through diverse representational systems.
After negotiating the 8-foot-high partition that she built across almost the entire width of the gallery, blocking our view of the space and impeding access, we first noticed debris on the floor of this semi-raw space. The walls were unfinished and on the floor were Sheetrock fragments, tarps and casually dispersed sawhorses. After a while, we noticed the delicate architectural models balanced precariously on the edges of worktables or on the floor--a dozen or so miniature tableaux of world's fairs, circuses, refugee camps and containers ports. Only inches high, they are painstakingly crafted out of foreign newspapers available in London. Jackson used a cliche of installation art--the unfinished gallery--to make an allegory of the resourceful occupancy of appropriated spaces by people on the move.
In the middle of the room, a circle of eight video monitors faced outward, showing footage of Sunday gatherings of Philippine domestic servants in Hong Kong's Statue Square. Recent news reports have detailed abusive treatment of these amahs by some employers. The arrangement of monitors mimicked (but inverted) the small circles of socializing women, who enthusiastically talk, sing and share food to compensate for their isolation and drudgery.
On a separate monitor, Jackson showed a video of the El Ejido greenhouses in Spain's southern desert, which are worked by immigrant labor. The soundtrack, Moroccan haragas music, alluded to workers' perilous crossings from North Africa in unseaworthy craft. These songs of exile rally the communities of undocumented Arab laborers.
Jackson's hybrid approach and heterogeneous materials, including brochures with song lyrics and lists of things you can't send abroad, polemicized the devices of installation art. What excited us here was the candor with which she exposed both the potentialities and limitations of the installation genre. Encompassing such incompatible concerns as disengaged formalism, craft-sensitive fabrication and explicit social commentary, the artist conceived each work to scrutinize the purpose and achievement of the others. That the results were sometimes without obvious resolution made the exhibition particularly effective.
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