An exhibition of 18 paintings.

Bod Mellor's paintings work with existing images from films and television, which they cannibalise and mutilate with great relish. The oversized figures of exclusively female film stars are broken down to an approachable scale and caressed onto canvas. Yet, the actresses' own parts are just as untrustworthy as the projections designed into media imagery, to which Mellor reacts with an iconoclastic excess of wit, colour, composition and pathos. The bourgeois understanding of what has become proverbial good taste is not only overstretched here, but becomes the object itself. In order to reflect on their own position as speaker, Mellor permanently distances themself by delegating the painting process to a multitude of their identity constructions. The result is an agitated, stubborn form of painting that does not want to whitewash its inner contradictions, but attempts to celebrate them.

"Scato", Mellor's first institutional solo exhibition in over ten years, presents a continuation of their Sirens series. Depicted are, without exception, British actresses, each in the role of a policewoman. However, the portraits sink into lava, mud or indifferent broth, and the faces of the portrayed almost disappear behind blisters, wounds, nets and other assaults by the painting hands. This is insanely exaggerated, at times explicitly immature, but precisely for this reason it opens up a space in which lesbian desire, state authority and the media production of both can be nonchalantly negotiated. Like a thimblerigger, Mellor constantly swaps the positions of strength and weakness, as if to initiate discussions on questions of class and queerness instead of providing one-dimensional answers.

https://research.gold.ac.uk/id/eprint/39097