Melanie Velarde - Parcel (2016) Hi-Res

Cerberus spirit of the temporal, Melanie Velarde forages and fertilizes the fragility of human experience. With one foot on earth and the other on its satellite of memory, Velarde brings an affable anachronism to her work where other archivists agitate authority.

Velarde’s process, both panoramic and microscopic, embraces the methodology of record-keeping, but permits all documentation to disintegrate. She listens to our world kindly, chronicling awesome and unforgivable terrains, abandoned emblems of progress, and chance encounters as stories we remember, but have not yet lived.

Tomes evoked and bespoke, Velarde pairs field recordings from her immediate and traveled surroundings with found (or lost?) musical objects, layering the two into improvisatory analog music under the moniker TEMPORARYARCHIVES. For the third exchange in the Commend See series, Velarde fashions ten anthropological sensory excursions as 'Parcel,' the aural component to Christin Ripley’s metaphysical marble dye practice.