Mel Brimfield's complex practice takes a skewed and tangled romp through the already vexed historiography of performance art, simultaneously revealing and inventing a rich history of collaboration between artists, dancers, theatre makers, political activists and comedians. Meticulously drawn and painted posters and programmes for fictional interdisciplinary cabarets, together with costumes and props, are produced alongside documentary-style films and live works that playfully associate performance art with most significant cultural developments of the last 100 years. Low-end showbiz memoirs, sensationalist biographical documentaries and cheap-to-make TV clip programmes compiling lists of 'The 100 Top/Best/Greatest...' are referenced in the work alongside formal museological displays of performance ephemera and documentation. The second hand anecdotes and mythologies surrounding performers and their performances are expanded, distorted and completely supplanted by new fictions, with archival photographs and footage, and authentic ephemera being appropriated and re-contextualised, or entirely invented at will. Mel Brimfield was born in Oxford, 1976. She lives and works in London. Recent solo exhibitions include 'This Is Performance Art – Part 2: Experimental Theatre and Cabaret', LICA, Lancaster, 2012, 'This is Performance Art – Performed Sculpture and Dance', Yorkshire Sculpture Park, Wakefield and Mead Gallery, Warick, 2011, 'This is Performance Art: Performed Sculpture and Dance', Camden Art Centre, London, 2010 and 'Waiter Waiter, Theres a Sculpture in my Soup: Part II, Performance Art and Comedy from Gutai to the Present' , Pumphouse Gallery, London, 2009 and Ceri Hand Gallery, Liverpool, 2008. Group exhibitions include 'Memory of a Hope', Ceri Hand Gallery, Liverpool, 2011 and 'LOCATE', 3 commissions curated by Sarah Williams, with Aura Satz and Sarah Pickering at Jerwood Visual Arts, London, 2010. Mel's recent performances include 'This is Performance Art - Part 3: The Conceptual Burlesque of Nice Style the World's First Pose Band', the Henry Moore Institute, Leeds, 2012, 'This is Performance Art',The White Chapel, London, 2011, 'Trashing Performance' festival, London, 2011, 'Intergender Wrestling', Word Festival, London, 2011 and 'The Breakfast Sculpture', Yorkshire Sculpture Park, 2011. Her new show at Ceri Hand Gallery will now run from 27 April 2012.

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If you would like to buy art produced by Mel Brimfield, please contact Ceri Hand Gallery by calling us on 00 44 (0) 151 207 0899 or click here to send us a message. We are able offer original art work for sale to suit all budgets and stock both unique works, editioned artist’s prints, multiples and publications. If you would like to buy art online by Mel Brimfield, please take a look at the Editions section of this website. We are always happy to offer advice, so please don’t hesitate to contact us with any questions about buying art.