MELVIN GRAVE GUZMAN
BIOGRAPHY
MELVIN (GRAVE) GUZMAN (b. 1989, Harlem, NY) works in photography, performance and monumental mixed-media. While Guzman pursues a range of distinct technical practices, his artwork consistently explores the oscillating relationship between city and self today. The artist often collaborates with fellow cultural revolutionaries like Onyx Collective, Kiki Kudo, Miho Hatori, Kembra Pfahler and the girls of Karen Black. His work has been featured in publications including High Snobiety, Hypebeast, and Whitewall Magazine.
Whether he’s sneakily snapping a photograph, orchestrating an otherworldly theatrical production, or carefully assembling an assortment of luxury advertisements into a sprawling tapestry, Guzman creates images, objects and performances, which explore the relationship between environment and identity in the Digital Age.
Made exclusively from found materials like torn magazine ads, shopping bags, boxes, and posters once discarded by consumer society, his sculptures, costumes, sets and sprawling mixed media works trace the artist’s travels through the world’s urban jungles. Repurposed in his thoughtful constructions, the refuse of contemporary culture invokes our brand lust and sentimentality at once, bringing awareness not only to our material desires, but also - to the inevitably tattered demise of what we consider “valuable” today. Like a fun house mirror, Guzman’s absurdist creations reflect the distorted image of our own false appetites in real time - each a whimsical parody of the irrational fantasies contemporary media culture effects on our ideas of beauty, value, truth and relevance.
“Across a landscape of desire where consumerism constitutes lifestyle and luxury in surfeit subsumes identity, there wanders a creative adventurer named Melvin “Grave” Guzman. A scavenger of our wasteful excess and an interlocutor of those discrete meanings that lay latent within our manic materialism, Guzman is watchful of our wishes and conscious of the cultural subconscious that compels the compulsions of acquisition. He understands the nature of our dream machine and moves through our dreams like an interloper whose interventions are at once a trespass, a theft and a rescue. His art, a tracing of his travels and examination of the traces strewn to the side of our perpetual distraction, is a saving grace, the best thing that can be said about all that is wrong at the moment.” Carlo McCormick, 2019
ADDITIONAL INFORMATION
PHOTOGRAPHY
If your life were to flash before your eyes, it might appear like a Snapstory of Guzman’s photographs. In images that depict the fleeting, high impact visual moments that characterize city life today, the artist captures the osmosis between urban jungles and their inhabitants. The world’s capitals shine through Grave’s portraits of urban youth, while his cityscapes tell the stories of the individuals who have passed through them.
Whether working in digital or analog photography, the artist always edits his images to achieve the same goal: by eliminating any gray tones in a photograph, he transforms his subjects into pure black and white articulations of form. To preserve the full force of this gesture in the final work, the artist prints images using a radiology machine (unlike typical printers, radiologists don’t skimp on black ink). The effect is both evidentiary and nostalgic. In Guzman’s eerily dreamy photographs, glimpses of the landscape appear like urban x-rays while unsuspecting human subjects emerge as portraits of friendly ghosts.
MONUMENTAL MIXED MEDIA
If Guzman’s photos give the impression of flash-backs, his mixed media pieces have the effect flash-forwards. He begins this work by collecting source material – stickers, posters, flyers or discarded luxury advertisements found in the debris of cities around the world. Whether he compiles these elements into a collage or emblazons an individual advertisement with the painted drips, splatters, and happy accidents signature to his graffiti style – the artist takes great care in embellishing, arranging, and layering his materials. He sees any existing rips, tatters, or smudges he might encounter in his source material as deliberate aesthetic contributions to the composition and he considers them attentively when adding his own marks to their scrappy surfaces.
Each an ode to organized chaos, these pieces often confuse the viewer’s sense of time and place, probing one to ask: where, when, why, and how a given image came to be constructed. What has been contributed by the artist? What’s original? What’s natural?
It’s a disorienting encounter. Guzman’s mixed media work has the transporting effect of beholding an ancient relic: each piece feels immediately close in time and place – then, almost as suddenly, far away, otherworldly, and just out of grasp. Standing in front of his largest works, the viewer can imagine they’ve been transported to the ruins of some contemporary urban center. In this post- human future, the footsteps of a lone teenage alien break the silence. Shaking a can of spray paint, our imaginary extra-terrestrial prepares to tag the crumbling monuments of consumer culture with his dystopian graffiti. And a clinking echo bounces across the rubble.
(above) Guzman’s signature phantom figure in green adorning a shopping bag from the Metropolitan Museum of Art
THE PHANTOM
Like a hidden Micky, the phantom figure often appears in Guzman’s work. The artist first created the abstract character by chance during the execution of a performance art piece. The performance, which was inspired by an evening when the artist was stabbed in an uptown bar, featured Guzman acting as the hands of a clock, forming a large charcoal ring around him. As he created the ring, the artist simultaneously marked time by expressively slashing a scrap of Givenchy promotional material at his feet with the charcoal. The resulting (vaguely triangular) linear abstraction, now known as the phantom, has come to signify the presence of good and evil, dark and light, yin and yang when and wherever it emerges in the artist’s work. “The phantom was created when I got a second chance at life, so the phantom represents that first life,” says Guzman of his haunting signature, “But it’s still a part of me, it’s always with me. Like the good and the bad, you can’t know one without the other. The phantom is all about that kind of duality.” For more on the origin story of the phantom, see interview here.
“Guzman’s narrative, a story assembled in shards - entireties forever incomplete, conjuring like constellations where representation is a kind of connect the dots along the abject periphery of abstraction, is a shamanic storytelling befitting urban myth. His comic book reinvention of self, complete with a tragic-heroic alter ego The Phantom whose painful origin story based off a life-changing incident in which the artist had his face brutally sliced open in an uptown bar, is itself a cipher, a perpetual retracing of the cut, emblazoned as a sign reduced to a logo, Zorro’s mark reconstituted into the vernacular of graffiti, a tag whose very I was here presence connotes a converse gesture of absence.” Excerpted from exhibition essay by Carlo McCormick. Read full essay here.
Installation View, Detourned, exhibition by Melvin “Grave” Guzman, ABXY Gallery, 2019 | Photo courtesy of Erik Bardin Photography
