In conjunction with our concurrent exhibitions, Smack Mellon will host an intimate tour led by exhibiting artists Armando Guadalupe Cortés, who will talk about his installation in Gallery One, Dead Parrot Radio, and Chang Yuchen, who will discuss her Gallery Two installation, For those who share mornings and evenings. 

Armando Guadalupe Cortés is an artist living and working in Brooklyn. Originally from Urequío, a small farming community in Michoacán, México, Cortés draws inspiration from everyday aspects of his two vastly different worlds. His practice builds on storytelling, object making, and performance traditions. He merges traditional forms and methods from his native home with broader Latin American literary traditions, and contrasts and hybridizes them with elements of his life in the United States. 

In his work–ranging from small-scale sculpture to sculpture-based endurance performance–Cortés interweaves influences from his life in a metropolis and a rural farming society. Drawing from oral history, observation, and personal experience, Cortés explores and blends endurance, and labor into his performance, craft and industry into his sculpture, and history into his material choice.

Through his work Cortés strives to propel and make believable narratives often overlooked. This propagation of story takes the form of myth building. This myth-making challenges notions of spectacle and viewership while raising the question of myth as antonym to history. In questioning this dichotomy, Cortés seeks to upend the idea of myth and lore as fiction.

Chang Yuchen works in an interdisciplinary manner: writing as weaving, drawing as translation, teaching as hospitality, commerce as social experiment (see Use Value) and publishing as a dandelion spreading its seeds. Yuchen was a recipient of New York Public Library Picture Collection Artist Fellowship, Queens Art Fund New Work Grant, Poetry Project Curatorial Fellowship, Huayu Youth Award, Luminarts Fellowship, etc. She has shown/performed her work at Walker Art Center, Beijing Commune, Carnegie Museum of Art, Amant, Artists Space, Instituto Tomie Ohtake, UCCA Dune, Para Site, Taikwun Contemporary. She was an artist in residence at Smack Mellon, Asymmetry Art Foundation, MASS MoCA, Museum of Art and Design, Robert Blackburn Printmaking Workshop. Yuchen has written for publications including Heichi Magazine, Press and Fold, Art in Print, and Randian.