PITTSBURGH, PA.- Mattress Factory is presenting Red Gold, the first U.S. solo exhibition by Cairo-based artist Yasmine El Meleegy (b. 1991).

Rooted in research conducted in Egypt’s Nile Valley, Red Gold transforms the museum’s gallery into a meditation on food, labor, and globalization through the simple sun-dried tomato. In Egypt, rows of bright red Roma tomatoes dry under the Mediterranean sun, their market value rising more than twenty-fold as they shrink in size and grow in economic importance. Dubbed “red gold,” this export commodity embodies the contradictions of tradition and modernization, foreign aid and economic precarity, local labor and global agribusiness.

For Mattress Factory, El Meleegy takes salt, the essential element of tomato preservation, as her central sculptural medium. Mixed with water and cornstarch and cast into custom molds, salt tiles form fragile white reliefs that line the floor of a room-sized greenhouse. Their surfaces depict dried tomatoes, harvesting knives, grasshoppers, and nightshade plants, images drawn from the artist’s time spent in Luxor and surrounding agricultural regions. Suspended at the gallery entrance, a vacuum-sealed bag of hand-painted resin tomatoes offers an uncanny echo of the produce’s final commercial form.

“El Meleegy’s installation reveals the complex entanglements of food and power, abundance and scarcity,” said David Oresick, Executive Director of Mattress Factory. “There is a delicate minimalist elegance in the white salt tiles she has created, they are at once austere and beautiful. Their quiet presence holds a world of imagery: knives, grasshoppers, and tomatoes that speak to survival and exchange. Her work reminds us that what we consume is never just food, but also a global story of labor, tradition, and trade.”

The installation builds on El Meleegy’s long-term engagement with the politics of agriculture and the often-invisible labor behind what ends up on our plates. It reflects her multidisciplinary approach, spanning sculpture, design, museology, restoration, and archaeology, that uses replication and craft to disrupt inherited cultural legacies.
This exhibition continues Mattress Factory’s commitment to supporting artist-centered, site-specific, process-driven installations that push boundaries formally and conceptually.

Yasmine El Meleegy (b. 1991) is an Egyptian multidisciplinary artist and sculptor living and working in Cairo who is also a time-traveling archaeologist. Through her work, she creates participatory events to instantiate counter- narratives. Her work is concerned with the representation of history, repair and materiality in relation to histories of places such as her latest performative intervention at Stephenson’s 100-year-old pharmacy in downtown Cairo Scaffolding a Familiar Epoch.

Her practice stems from a personal impulse to fix and mend, an act which both staves off, and confirms the certainty of loss. Approaching defunct, damaged household items with painstaking care, she seeks to restore an object's emotional and historic resonance by repairing its physicality by creating monumental installations and artifacts as archaeological sites of the future.

She is a nominee for the 7th edition of the Future Generation Art prize (2024). She is the recipient of AFAC Visual Arts Grant, Mophradat Artists Grant, Culture Resource Al-Mawred Al-Thaqafy Artists Grant (2021), Lieux publics (2022), Pro Helvetia (2018), and has taken part in residencies at Art Omi: Artists, New York (2019), at Atelier Mondial Basel (2018), at The Egyptian Academy in Rome (2015) and at CAOS Museum in Italy (2015). Her work is in the collection of MOCA Yinchuan, China.