Melissa McGill
October 30, 2024–February 8, 2025
“My aim is to illuminate our interconnectedness with reciprocity with nature and explore new ways of navigating forward with nature’s wisdom as our guide.”
Mazzoleni presents Melissa McGill’s most expansive gallery exhibition to date, encompassing work from 1998 to 2024.
Guided by waterways and the cosmos for over 25 years, Melissa McGill explores mysterious and extraordinary natural places and perspectives, offering new ways to navigate some of the urgent and relevant environmental topics of our challenging times. Each of her projects takes the form of a constellation—of individuals, organizations and elements—coming together to create new illuminated stories in reciprocity with nature.
After the 2019 project Red Regatta, McGill, alarmed by the precarious state of our waterways, followed the Venetian Lagoon’s waters back to their source. The Po River, Italy’s longest river, is an ancient and enduring life force that flows into the Adriatic Sea, just south of the Venetian Lagoon. When friends and collaborators in Italy shared news of the Po River’s neglected and dying state due to climate change and exploitation, McGill began to envision how to support the Po itself through a creative telling of its story. In July 2023 and in Summer 2024, she travelled to the Po’s source and delta, its beginning and its end. These deeply moving and engaging trips inspired a water storytelling project titled Lifeline, where the Po River is the guiding ancestral narrator.
“This exhibition connects the stars and the waterways and traces the arc of my entire artistic oeuvre, inviting exploration of perspective, mapping, water storytelling, constellations and connections between past, present and future. In studying and intervening with historical maps (some are found and some are from the State Archives of Turin) I engage with water and natural organic and homemade materials in the same way I have engaged in collaborative interventions in the public realm“, the artist notes.
Melissa McGill. ERIDANUS: The River Constellation. Mazzoleni, Torino, October 30, 2024–February 8, 2025. Private view: Wednesday October 30, 2024, 6–10pm. Press release.
Mazzoleni, Piazza Solferino, 2–10121 Torino. T (+39) 011.534473, email: torino [at] mazzoleniart.com. Gallery hours: Tuesday–Saturday: 10am–1pm / 3:45–7:15pm. mazzoleniart.com.