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 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, the Yale Davenport Collection, and the Milwaukee Museum of Art.
