Mel Chilianis: October Featured Resident
Socially Distant Art is excited to highlight Mel Chilianis as one of our Featured Residents for the month of October!
Melanie's compositions have been performed and broadcast live on ABC-FM (Australia) and Radio 3 (National radio, Italy), as well as on many local radio stations. In addition, Melanie’s compositions have been performed in Italy and the USA and many of her pieces have been released through Move Records (Australia). She has contributed her work as sound installation, to video art, museum alcoves and curated gallery exhibitions in Australia, the USA, Sweden, and Italy. Melanie also performed flute pieces by contemporary composers in local and regional festivals. Her solo work is improvised She has a PhD in cultural studies and has published on bodily & minded difference in society and culture, historicizing music composition and sexual assault, and ways of listening in technoscientific contexts.
Image Description: Mel, a gender nonconforming woman with short dark curly hair. She wears a grey and black striped jumper and plays a flute, looking away to the side, with the room's ceiling corner angled away in the background.
Artist Statement
"The electronic and instrumental music I engage with evokes some of the bodily and minded states associated with epilepsy and other conditions. This extends beyond the ‘I’ interrupting or extending epilepsy into the fantastic and at times the melodramatic. Both the bodymind and the fantastic can be disorienting – but this can be used to provoke questions about what is expected or valuable. In my PhD I was interested in how the epileptic body gestured through electronic music and how the sonic and language communicated with each other (something I’m still grappling with especially in terms of accessibility). In the generative sound installation below I wanted to think about socialized music in cycles. In recent work, I am letting the bodymind lead.”