The Leftovers
March 12-18, 2023 at Kunstraum LLC, New York City
Solo exhibition by Dana Melaver
Curated by Nicole Beck
Our storage units, closets, cupboards and drawers are not only containers of belongings but of old stories idly waiting to re-enter our lives. These collections of things are paused for a potential future but deemed unneeded for our present. What prevails is our attachment to these objects and the parts of ourselves - past or potential - they embody. Whether it be camping gear, a grandparent’s dresser, linen, or birthday cards, the objects we choose to keep cast a light on our values, hopes and uncertainties. Imbued with the emotional weight of memory, our storage is the mess we hide behind a roller door. These objects are neither here nor there, neither useful nor useless, neither essential nor nonessential. Storage is more a state than a space; a state of limbo between our imperfect past and latent future. It is the experience of carrying material or immaterial objects and the conflict between holding on and letting go.
Dana Melaver’s The Leftovers grapples with this idea. This new body of work is born entirely of an apartment that was broken down into a storage space in March 2020. For the past three years, unit #2070 has been home to early art projects, forks, and toothpaste: a neighborhood of practical and sentimental relics. In The Leftovers, Melaver uses this stowed-away archive as raw material for new work, turning a mattress into a canvas, scrap paper into a projection screen, an umbrella stand into a musical instrument. By allowing these objects to change, Melaver grants new life to the things left behind.
Woven through The Leftovers is the thread of attachment: is it antithetical or essential to life? Life and the activatable Wunderdresser see disparate objects stitched into tender fibers of the past. Multimedia installation Attachment, Issues presents glimpses of a material and immaterial life the artist struggles to relinquish. By fixing these objects into new constellations, Melaver dually fulfills the need to attach and to adapt. The photographic print don’t leave me i never left reflects the self-imposed state of storage; a spirit tethered to its belongings. Self Storage converts the storage unit and its contents into a site of imaginative experimentation, where the artist toys with the objects that toy with her. In opposition to the static nature of storage, The Studio is a space where objects are granted the freedom to live, to grow, and to change. Here, visitors can step into the artist’s process of creation, experimentation, and trying to figure it all out. Capturing the essence of The Leftovers is Quiet Moment (The Cardboard Piece), a sculptural work that breaks down and reconstructs the skeleton of storage itself - the cardboard box.
These pieces traverse textile, video, and installation whilst maintaining a conversation with photography. The Leftovers plays with the idea of photography as an attempt to capture time, as a device for holding on. To make a photograph is to fix an image. It is an act of choosing what to keep and of what to let go. But this attempt to hold on, this freeze frame, is the antithesis of life. It stifles the nature of change and growth. A frozen grape will never become wine. This begs the question: what makes a life and how does a life continue to change?
- Written by Nicole Beck, edited by Dana and Elle Melaver
