Meckseper’s film PELLEA[S], 2018 adapts the Symbolist play Pelléas et Mélisande (1892), weaving together fictional scenarios and dramatic footage captured by the artist at the 2017 presidential inauguration and the landmark women’s march that followed.

Conflating contemporary political realities to Arnold Schoenberg’s modernist sound poem of Pelléas et Mélisande, the city of Washington, D.C. and its architecture become a context and site of departure, giving voice to debates around notions of gender found in the original play.

Meckseper expresses through cinema the dramatic narratives and relationships contained within the universe of her signature glass and mirror vitrines, and draws a direct correlation to the way early Modernism and the avant-garde developed into a form of political and aesthetic resistance to classism and capitalism.

[8] Source:[9] While Meckseper’s earliest vitrine works commented on contemporary consumer culture using the shop window as an example and focus point for civic unrest and protest, documented in her film works, her later steel and glass vitrines, allude to the political dimension of early modernist Bauhaus display architecture and design between World War I and II in Weimar Germany.

Placed in a vacant lot next to Times Square, the fully motorized pump jacks recalled the ruins of ghost towns, forgotten monuments of America's decaying industrial past.