Elegy of the Garden
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.
Dull_Drought_Distanced_Dear
Archival Pigment Print, 2020, 37.5 x 32.5 inches (95.25 x 82.55 cm), Edition of 3
Our Sighs into Nothingness
2020, 37.5 x 32.5 inches (95.25 x 82.55 cm), Edition 3
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.
Through the Vapor and Moonlight
2021, Archival pigment print, 37.5 x 32.5 inches (95.25 x 82.55 cm), Edition of 3
This Quiet Persistent Rain
2021, Archival Pigment Print, 30 x 26 inches (76.2 x 66.04 cm), Edition of 3
The Last Scud of Day
2021, Archival Pigment Print, 30 x 26 inches (76.2 cm x 66.04 cm), Edition of 3
Shroud of Stars
2021, Archival Pigment Print, 30 x 26 inches (76.2 x 66.04 cm), Edition of 3
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.
Whether by Day Abducted,
2021, Archival Pigment Print, 37.5 x 32.5 inches (95.25 x 82.55 cm), Edition of 3
Candid in May, Dear to the Moss
2021, Archival Pigment Print, 25 x 24.5 inches (63.5 x 62.23 cm), Edition of 3
The New Loss is Not like the Old Loss
2022, Duraclear and Archival pigment print on LED lightbox, 44 x 38 inches (111.76 x 96.52 cm), Unique
Thread the Dews All Night
2022, Archival Pigment Print, 37.5 x 32.5 inches (95.25 x 82.55 cm), Edition of 3
The Shadow that Everything Casts
2022, Archival Pigment Print, 25 x 24.5 inches (63.5 x 62.23 cm), Edition of 3