Mel Prest
Gallery Affiliations: MINUS SPACE, B Sakata Garo, Pierogi
Region: Pacific Coast
Website: http://www.melprest.com
City / State: San Francisco, CA
I'm mesmerized by color. Line comes from reducing marks to a simple form. A straight line can signify everything or nothing in the world. Either way, it's a way to begin. I'm absorbed in the mark- and aside from pencil dots (to mark the field) lines are the only mark I'm making.
These works are based on the songs from the first five Led Zeppelin albums; each piece is a unique song spelled letter by letter in gouache, ink, pencil and watercolor. I use a grid of dots as a system to chart and construct with colored lines. 25 dots correspond to the first 25 letters of the alphabet. I begin connecting the points as I spell and map relationships of words. When mistakes are made, that word is spelled by a single, discordant color.
Turning words into a series of lines produces a knot or web of architectural space that visually embodies the connection between these lyrics. The work is a way of concretizing abstract, fleeting, and transitory experiences.