The Creep
2023
solo exhibition at E-WERK Luckenwalde

Oh! Get away with it for long enough, and it'll start to look like fate.

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To creep is to move quietly, with stealth, to avoid detection. A creep is a person who produces feelings of discomfort and fear in others. Creeps creep; their violence is experienced as affect, felt rather than seen. It is hard to quantify and therefore hard to prove, sometimes even hard to believe. People creep, so can structures, so can ideologies. Time creeps, so can pleasure, so can death.

Melanie Jame Wolf’s exhibition The Creep at E-WERK Luckenwalde includes a new film installation, ceramic works, textile sculptures, and performance. It is a continuation of the visual artist and choreographer’s ongoing 'creep studies'. In Walter Benjamin's concept of 'mythic violence,' oppressive power is understood as being accumulated and maintained by disingenuously performing itself as natural law. As an exhibition, The Creep enacts a poetic meditation on the dynamic between violence, desire, and performativity – ostensibly in the form of a duet between an outlaw figure and a mountain. Wolf plays these tensions by orchestrating a conversation between the moving image and the sculptural texture.

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Mountains creep at glacial speed, as The Outlaw creeps through the complicated fantasies he symbolises and subverts. What is explored are the covert choreographies of how power moves. Forced silences, double meanings & omissions, invisible actions, performances of reputation, and what Alison M. Jaggar terms ‘Outlaw Emotions’ wind through a mythic landscape.