MELANIE PULLEN
VOYEUR
May 18th - July 6th, 2024
Opening Reception: Saturday, May 18th, 5-8PM
“I’m continuously creating imagery that questions our perceptions and our ingrained desire to observe the forbidden, to find beauty where we shouldn’t and to glamorize violence.” - Melanie Pullen
William Turner Gallery is pleased to announce an exhibition marking the first solo show of photographs by Melanie Pullen in Voyeur, from May 18th-July 6th, 2024.
The gallery will present a showcase of Pullen’s photographic works ranging from her early High Fashion Crime Scenes to her more recent monographs. Pullen explores the glamorization and desensitization of violence on the human psyche through themes of voyeurism, early forensic photography, and war photojournalism. She self-proclaims their appropriation as exploitative as the images boldly confront societal morés through tongue-and-cheek tableaux.
Melanie Pullen is the architect of meticulously re-constructed orchestrations of large-scale photographs depicting scenes which examine social constructs and their taboos. Resembling high-budget film noir, she narrates thematic vignettes rife with grit and glamour through challenging ideas concerning images of death, war, sex, violence and the voyeurism attached to their documentation and consumption. Engaging in a critical dialogue of ‘forensic aesthetics’ in her artistic practice, she interrogates and reconfigures ethical quandaries surrounding epistemologies of an object-oriented culture.
In her critically acclaimed High Fashion Crime Scenes, Pullen framed true unsolved crime scenes and suicides sourced from the Los Angeles and New York Coroner’s Offices and the Los Angeles Police Department’s archives. Giving herself a guideline, the subjects were never post-1950 and were always unidentified Jane-Does’. Her elaborately detailed sets often utilized luxury brands to re-dress the macabre scenes into high-fashion editorials which open up stories at the end of someone’s life. She addresses sexually directed violence and ushers a critique of how media often chooses to glamorize the depictions and in its wake desensitizes the audience. Through her gaze, agency is afforded to unknowns, exhuming those who would otherwise have been entombed into the posthumous annals of a coroners office and resurrected in these memento mori. Due to her work and research, she is on the Los Angeles School of Forensic’s advisory board.
The masculine counterpart to High Fashion Crime Scenes is her Violent Times series. Deciphering between the art of creating moments as in her previous series, in this, she distinguishes the art of capturing moments as a war journalist would. Appropriating themes of 18th and 19th century European history paintings, she captures how this visual propaganda was a tool utilized in extending European Imperialism’s grand ambitions and dissemination of its ideologies.
In response to her own practice of quoting from crime scenes, Pullen’s Voyeur series is a playful retort to her previous monographs. Suffused with irony, she pointedly turns the lens like a predatory weapon with its cross-hairs aimed at the spectator’s fetished gaze. Stalking the stalker, the audience is reminded, they too are complicit in the participation of trespass. She Gilds her prying subjects in the cloaks of Prada and Marc Jacobs, further addressing objectification, possession, materialism and the commodification of photography and its product in Hitchcockian-like narratives. The ethos surrounding the eros of detachment through the act of looking at what is not intended to be viewed, binarily activates desire and mobilizes conscience.
Cinematic lighting and staging are omnipresent in her visual compositions inspired by film directors such as Stanley Kubrick and the French New Wave, however her singular aesthetic was partially borne of resourcefulness. Producing her own sets, lighting and styling in a guerrilla-like process at the beginning of her career, her work has matured to where she now can employ up to one hundred people for a shoot. Working with a Hasselblad camera, she is able to blow the images up to their monumental scale.
Melanie Pullen’s (b. 1975) photography has been shown in major museums and galleries internationally and is permanently in the holdings of many of the most prominent public and private collections around the world including: Colección Jump, Mexico City, Mexico; Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA), Jacksonville, Florida; The Frederick R. Weisman Museum of Art, Pepperdine University, Malibu, California; Nasher Museum of Contemporary Art, North Carolina; Howard Stein & the Forward Thinking Collection, New York, New York; Walker Art Center Museum, 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.
Her 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. Pullen has published three photography books. Melanie was awarded the D&D Yellow Pencil Award. She currently lives and works in Los Angeles, California.
Pullen has published numerous books of her photography with notable fine-art publishers such as: Nazraeli Press and most recently in 2020 with Kodansha Press, in Japan.
