MARIE MELLOTT: SHORT BIO

Marie Mellott is a studio artist residing in Milwaukee. She has a Fine Arts Degree from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee and has also studied with William Wegman. Her drawings have been shown in many galleries in America and in Germany. The last five years she has been doing collaborative work with composers, actors, and video artists using a Projection Theatre art form, artwork which is performed using slide dissolve techniques.

My most recent series of drawings for projection theatre with original music is a collaborative multimedia performance directed by visual artist Marie Mellott and music by composer Yehuda Yannay entitled, The Geometry of Aloneness. This piece brings together the feeling of solitude with the passage of time.

I have also collaborated with the composer, Susan Parenti, in a piece which she created called, No, Honey, I Can Do It for manipulated tape recording and computer imaged slides. This piece is a witty counterpoint of body gestures and word-play with feminist overtones.

I was commissioned by the Womens Experimental Theater (WET) to create a piece for projection theater and cello-solo composed and performed by Yehuda Yannay. This piece entitled,I cant fathom it is motivated by a rape incident in the family and mass violence against women In Bosnia. The visuals are mixed-media collage drawings on slides, animated by sound-controlled twin projectors with a Sharp dissolve unit which I control during the performance.

I have collaborated in choreography and performance of concrete poetry by Marton Koppany, a Hungarian writer and poet, and personal friend since his time spent in Milwaukee. Yehuda and I created sound and choreography for his poem, Immortality and Freedom and have presented several other works of his in live performance with him.

Video artist Jerry Fortier asked me to contribute to a video opera entitled Journey to Orgonon based on the life of the psychoanalyst Wilhem Reich. I created a series of 80 collages to be projected by sound-controlled twin projectors with a dissolve unit. I performed the work for a premiere in the New Music Across America Festival. The collages are based on a quote from Reich: .. It must be decided whether nature is an empty space with a few widely scattered specks or whether it is a space full of primordial energy.

Composer Yehuda Yannay commissioned me to create a series of slides to be projected over a singer in the performance of In Madness There is Order,a performance piece for actor/singer and synthesizers based on sounds derived from the poetry of Antonin Artaud and Paul Celan. I created a series of 100 slides that were projected as overlays over the performer to enhance the total effect by breaking the visual surface into mysterious, dreamlike images. This performance piece has been performed nationally and internationally.