When I was younger, I obsessively collected images and objects around my hometown. I kept piles of waterlogged paper flyers from around my neighborhood - lost dogs, lawn mowers for sale, Spanish lessons. When they got rained on, the ink would bleed into saturated watercolor-like images, creating new colors and

dissolving the original forms.

 

I worked at a store that sold copies of The Slammer, a newspaper made up of mugshots of everyone arrested in the county that month. Sometimes the printer would malfunction and people’s faces would come out smudged or distorted, partially wiping away their identities.

 

My friends worked for a junk removal company and would bring me cameras they found while clearing out houses. They often still had memory cards or tapes inside - home videos, high school sports games, weddings.

 

Recently, while helping my parents move, I found a box containing all of this material -the damaged posters, copies of The Slammer, old cameras, memory cards, and tapes. I started imagining the people, animals, and places all knowing each other, forming a fictional place built from fragments of a real one." -Tommy Malekoff

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Villa Magdalena is pleased to present Bermuda Run, an exhibition of paintings, sculpture, and video by American artist Tommy Malekoff.

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The paintings in the exhibition reference water-damaged lost dog posters from Malekoff’s hometown in North Carolina. The series began early in his practice and is revisited here through a new process involving painting, water, and manipulated printing. Removed from their original context and pushed further into abstraction, the dogs and their surroundings begin to dissolve, taking on forms that feel at once familiar and difficult to place. Bermuda Run also includes three new sculptural works from Malekoff’s ongoing Roadsite series. Based on roadside structures caught in transitional states

-businesses that have closed, changed use, or outlived their original identities- the buildings are stripped of signage and other identifying details and reduced to their architecture. Presented as scaled-down, illuminated structures, they sit somewhere between real places and imagined ones.

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Inside Roadsite XI (Double Decker DQ), a video titled Guilford County Meltdown plays. The work marks Malekoff’s first use of found video and introduces an editing process he refers to as “meltdown” The footage comes from early digital cameras recovered through a junk removal job between 2006 and 2010, many of which still contained memory cards or tapes left behind by their previous owners. Images are layered, repeated, and dissolved into one another until the original recordings begin to lose their narrative function. Together, the recordings become less about the individual lives they document and more about the world they seem to collectively inhabit.