Meltpoint by Mark Maher

Meltpoint is a personal exploration into the nature of things, especially the nature of
love – into the seeing of another person, intensely, and with an intimacy both tender
and brutal. It’s an odd mix: artist’s monograph and lover’s diary – with concerns as
divergent as religion, the pleasures of rust, and even a kind of artistic time travel. It’s
the result of my gorgeously awkward journey through a maze of Finnish darkness,
Hungarian logic, and my American dreams. And it’s about how nothing lasts – least of all what we cherish.

It began as café and holiday snapshots of my Hungarian co-parent, Kriszta Maher-
Zsitvay, taken across Helsinki tables, in Adriatic sunshine, and near idyllic Finnish lakes

– with Kriszta’s sparkling at my attentions eroding to modesty, then impatience that I’d ‘waste’ so much film on one person. Only later I decided to make something more of these snapshots, using a peculiar process I first had to invent. My studio technique involves melting a wispy image onto a heavy steel plate, then altering it with blown heat and sharp knives. It all happens in a moment. Melting speeds up time and breaks down space – a hardcore equivalent of time-lapse photography, where events are greatly accelerated to make unseen processes visible. I’m interested in the frailness of images – their robust authority dependent on simple materials supporting flamboyant mirages. They’re composed of thick steel plates, but are also ephemeral visions; pasted lattices melting toward nothing – the place pictures start from.

Mark Maher - Helsinki