From May 31 to October 26, 2025
Curator: Helena Chávez Mac Gregor

Juan Soriano Gallery

Time feel less if we stay still, by British-Mexican artist Melanie Smith, gathers together a series of works that explore the connections between nature and culture. The title is taken from a phrase in the short story “Axolotl,” by Julio Cortázar.

At a time marked by the mass extinction of animal species and the radical transformation of life on our planet, Smith explores new ways of observing the life that is all around us. She turns her gaze to a forest devouring the ruins of a town built by Henry Ford in 1928, in depths of the Amazon River basin, where he attempted to establish a group of rubber factories. She shares part of her ongoing research into Ambystoma mexicanum, a species of axolotl native to the Valley of Mexico: less than a thousand of the amphibians continue to live in their natural habitat, while millions live in captivity and have gone viral as merchandise. She practices a kind of “meditation” in the midst of a dizzying sequence of images detached from any narrative thread, which allow us to explore our mental states in a ubiquitous timeframe, sped up and dissociated from our bodies. And finally, she examines a tiny snail native to the coastal region of the Mexican state of Oaxaca, traditionally used to produce a purple dye for textiles: the species is in danger of extinction now, owing to industrial exploitation unconcerned with the millenary traditions that have preserved this living source of dye.

Examining the disconnections between our cultural history and the potentialities of life, Smith explores through images, drawings, and paintings, guided by no determinant narrative, new forms and sensibilities for imagining other coordinates of coexistence.

Melanie Smith is a member of the Sistema Nacional de Creadores.

Helena Chávez Mac Gregor is a researcher at the Instituto de Investigaciones Estéticas of the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM).