Vontrapped Installation

b. 1979, Bury, UKMelvin has achieved a great deal of success to date as an artist in his own right, resulting in several high profile awards, residencies and exhibitions both within the UK and abroad. Last year he won the Nationwide Mercury Art Prize, with his work featuring on the album cover for the music prize selected by Tim Marlow and Sir Peter Blake and was selected as one of four finalists for the Saatchi 4 New Sensations competition with a 3-minute wonder documentary on his work shown on Channel 4 in October 2007. As a result his work has been selected as part of both the Zablodowicz and Uhoda collections. Highlights this year include a solo exhibition, Looking forward to looking back, at Sassoon Gallery, London and a group show Nihilism, Silence and the Refusal to Speak at Paraplufabriek, in Nijmegen, the Netherlands. Both projects were the subject of documentaries made by the South East London Film Collective who Melvin continues to work with. His work often involves a great deal of cross-disciplinary and site-specific work and he has a longstanding collaborative partnership with his brother and composer Adam Melvin in developing both curatorial and artistic projects that combine music and visual art in tandem with one another so that neither one element is deemed subsidiary to the other. As a research area, it represents something of a first in its field and has allowed him to participate in some of the most innovative multi-disciplinary projects happening today. This work has involved working with numerous performance practioners particularly from the worlds of music and theatre. Examples include award winning jazz musician, Matt Bourne, Juice Vocal Trio, and the Netherlands based instrumental ensemble, Duo X.