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62 Earth and Elsewhere | Contemporary Works from the Collection
Earth and Elsewhere | Contemporary Works from the Collection 63
Jorge Méndez Blake
/ Mexico b.1974
/
Untitled
2010
/ Paint or vinyl on wall (produced from digital file)
/ Dimensions variable
/ Acc. 2011.078
/ Purchased 2011. Queensland Art
Gallery Foundation
Jorge Méndez Blake
Untitled
2010
Jorge Méndez Blake’s work reframes literary references and
images so that they take on new resonance and invite new
interpretations.
Untitled
was inspired by Émile-Antoine Bayard’s
illustration for the Jules Verne short story
Un drame dans les airs
(1851). The story describes a hair-raising hot-air balloon flight
with an uninvited guest, who is intent on dropping the ballast to
fly ever higher. The protagonist must outwit the stowaway, whose
irrational desire for altitude threatens them both.
Here, Méndez Blake comments on the nineteenth-century
European and North American literary genre of the adventure
story, linked as it was to colonial exploration, and the ideology of
progress as the advance of scientific knowledge. An earlier wall
painting showed a balloon careening over the gallery wall, its net
disintegrating, while a passenger clings for dear life to the basket.
This installation, however, depicts an earlier point in the narrative,
when the adventure still seems to be in hand — the net of the
balloon is still largely intact and disaster is only a possibility.