Melanie Pullen: Voyeur Digital catalog is now available to view

"The best fashion photographs can remind us of other works of art or expand the boundaries of the genre, redefining what a fashion photograph is supposed to do or be. 

The photographs that do both are the ones that excite me the most. For example, the work of Melanie Pullen (b. 1975) represents a relatively new type of fashion photograph — one that was made for artistic reasons and celebrated by the fashion press after the fact. Based on crime-scene photographs that she found in police archives in Los Angeles and New York City, Pullen’s work reverses the aspirational nature of most fashion photographs, celebrating instead the darkly romantic idea of dying young, beautiful, and well dressed. As an image of suicide, Half Prada flies in the face of the industry’s claim: buy our products and your life will improve. The waist-down cropping keeps what would have been the picture’s most disturbing aspect out of the frame, while the undone shoe strap becomes, in Roland Barthes’ terminology, 'the punctum disrupting the perfection of the image.' The viewer is simultaneously attracted to and repelled by an image that is virtually impossible to forget."

Paul Martineau 
Curator of Photography 
The J. Paul Getty Museum 

 
 

MELANIE PULLEN: VOYEUR

Voyeur marks Melanie Pullen’s first solo exhibition at William Turner Gallery of large-scale photographs from her highly acclaimed High Fashion Crime Scenes and Voyeur series’. 

Born in New York City in 1975, Melanie Pullen is a self-taught fine-art photographer raised in a family of photojournalists, publishers, and artists. Growing up within the halls of the famed Hotel Chelsea, Pullen was immersed in this avant-garde setting, which greatly informed her artistic practice. Bi-coastal from an early age, Melanie spent her formative years between New York City and Los Angeles.

Pullen’s work focuses extensively on both social values and taboos while purposely taking aim at the media’s exploitation of sex, gender, and violence. Pullen herself has noted that she targets society’s obsessive glamorization by literally re-dressing what are deeply disturbing events, forcing the viewer to question their own values and observations.

Her photography has been shown in major museums and galleries internationally: it is permanently in the holdings of many of the most prominent public and private collections around the world: Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA), Jacksonville, Florida; The Frederick R. Weisman Museum of Art, Pepperdine University, Malibu, California; Museo Jumex, Mexico City, Mexico; Howard Stein & the Forward Thinking Collection, New York, New York; Walker Art Center Museum, Minneapolis, Minnesota; The Rand Collection, Santa Monica, California. 

Most recently the Getty Museum acquired several pieces from her High Fashion Crime Scenes which now reside in their permanent collection after being included in their exhibition: Icons of Style: 100 Years of Fashion Photography.

Pullen’s work has been featured in a number of publications including: The New York Times, T Magazine; Los Angeles Times; Vogue; Esquire Magazine; ELLE; London’s Independent; Spin Magazine; W Magazine; Flaunt Magazine; 1814 Magazine; Rolling Stone Magazine and Vanity Fair. 

Melanie was awarded the prestigious D&D Yellow Pencil Award in 2007 and has published three photography books, two with Nazraeli Press, the other with Kodansha.  She currently lives and works in Los Angeles, California.

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Greg Miller - The Da Vinci Questionnaire - Nostalgic Nods to Ubiquitous Tropes

Greg miller at work in his Austin, Tx Studio

Extracting familiar pictorial codes from the pop culture of his youth, Greg Miller – who divides his time between New York, NY, Fredericksburg, TX and LA, CA, and whose work is featured in numerous museum and private collections, with a volume of his writings, photography and paintings having been published in 2010 – plumbs his own psychological depths only to discover what makes him love work and life.

 

To view the online exhibition catalog for the show please click HERE.

Once Upon A Time

Exhibition Catalog now available Online and in Print. Please contact the gallery for a copy of the print version.

Greg Miller: Once Upon A Time Exhibition Catalog Now Available

Greg Miller's artistic versatility is evident in his adept use of various painting styles. With a deft hand and craftsmanship, he navigates different techniques to achieve diverse visual effects in his work. Using a Renaissance practice of layering paint, he is able to achieve the photorealism in his portraits which is a highly labor intensive and skillful process.

One can observe Miller's skillful mastery of realism in his highly detailed and precise portrayals. Whether it's capturing the nuanced expressions of faces or rendering intricate textures, his attention to detail demonstrates his command over the Realist style.

The exhibition’s title comes from the work Once Upon a Time, which illustrates many of the themes, and techniques characteristic of Miller’s oeuvre. Central to the image is a black-and-white painting of a vintage Hollywood city-scape during its “Golden Age”.  Super-imposed, is the profile of a comic book action-hero surveying the vista. To the right, Grisaille is applied with spray paint to produce a photorealistic portrait of a woman seductively peering out from what appears to be a cropped still-frame. The scratched surface alludes to wear, and the passage of time. Collaged below is a text clipping of “the right” with a clock next to it, suggesting “time”. On the far left, a faceted crystal highball glass is labeled with a clipping reading “ACTION”.

Once Upon A Time, acrylic on canvas, 60” x 72”, History, acrylic on canvas, 36” x 72”, Truth, acrylic on canvas, 48” x 48”

GREG MILLER

Greg Miller (b. 1951) was born in Sacramento, California and holds a Master of Arts Degree from San Jose University. Once a long-time Venice, California resident, he currently resides in Austin, Texas.

His work is featured in numerous museum and private collections, including those of: the San Jose Museum of Art, Newport Harbor Museum, Crocker Museum of Art, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Laguna Art Museum, Riverside Art Museum,  Frederick R. Weisman Foundation and Charles Saatchi Foundation. The Get Go, a volume of his writings, photography and paintings was published in 2010, and the first comprehensive monograph of the artist, Signs of the Nearly Actual, was published in 2009.

GREG MILLER Once Upon A Time 
June 10, 2023 – August 12, 2023 

 
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