Von Lintel Gallery | Los Angeles

Melanie Willhide

Melanie Willhide Elegy of the Garden 2022

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Von Lintel Gallery is delighted to present new work by artist Melanie Willhide. A pioneer of merging analog and digital photographic practices, Melanie Willhide has challenged conventional notions of photography for over fifteen years and broadened the very definition of the medium. Willhide’s new series, Elegy of the Garden, continues her life-project of photographic innovation while taking on her current subject—the environmental crisis—with an immediacy and emotional intensity that evokes witnessing a powerful storm and what it leaves. In Willhide’s work, what is left behind is always beautiful, even if only a memory.

Willhide’s evolving and expansive process eschews “the decisive moment” to represent a broader feeling of time. She employs any tool her work demands. The flowers in this work—some real, some artificial—are captured with either a camera or scanner in such a way they exist as phenomena, dynamic as a hurricane or wildfire. Time does not stand still, and Willhide privileges texture and depth over realism. Plastic stems with nylon petals can be indistinguishable from flowers picked from the artist’s own garden, and the recognizable form morphs into pixelated abstraction. Willhide intertwines the natural world with the artificial, and we are moved to find where beauty survives in an era overcome by wind, water, and fire.

Willhide’s concern with eco-grief reaches beyond her own art practice and recent landscape designs; she recognizes the environmental crisis as perhaps the gravest calamity in human history. Many of her flowers seem to be floating away or drowning in water that possesses a supernatural force, as seas continue to rise, drought and subsequent famine persist, and mega storms destroy communities and contaminate drinking water. Left behind is loss and the fear of further loss: a dream of untouchable color moving in unfathomable darkness.

Willhide received her MFA from Yale University and has participated in solo and group exhibitions nationwide and internationally. Her work is included in permanent collections such as the Getty Museum, the George Eastman Museum, the Metropolitan Museum, LACMA and the Yale Davenport Collection.

Melanie Willhide Henbane for Honey Bun

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Melanie Willhide Henbane for Honey Bun Exhibition Views

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Melanie Willhide to Adrian Rodriguez, with love

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Melanie Willhide Exhibition Views 2012

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Melanie Willhide

For nearly two decades, Melanie Willhide’s work has challenged notions of traditional photography in the interest of broadening the scope and reach of the art form. Her photographs continually prove that radical experimentation can dwell in beauty. For Willhide, her elastic photographic process merges the realms of the actual, the possible, and the imaginary; the results of which generate a captivating personal fiction. She asks difficult questions of the medium, such as: Which side, front or back, is the actual photograph? Our hallucinations become digitized, as family history, landscape, and memory coalesce as something like false nostalgia, but more aching and real. Her latest work enacts the dramatic intersection between the unfathomably endangered natural world and the land dweller’s troubled psyche, the seemingly irreversible danger from which we cannot separate ourselves.

Born in Connecticut in 1975, Willhide earned an MFA in Photography from Yale University School of Art and a BFA from Rhode Island School of Design. Her work is included in numerous public collections including LACMA, The George Eastman Museum, Milwaukee Art Museum, and The Getty. She has exhibited throughout the United States and has been reviewed a nd featured in The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, Blind Spot, Art in America and Modern Painters. She lives in the woods just outside New Haven, Connecticut.

 

Read Melanie Willhide's full CV

Read Melanie Willhide's full CV

View Melanie Willhide's reviews

View Melanie Willhide's reviews

Melanie Willhide Publication

 

Melanie Willhide
To Adrian Rodriguez,
with Love

Text by Jason Labbe

23 Pages


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