MELANIE WILLHIDE to Adrian Rodriguez with love
April 2 – May 14, 2011
Artist Talk: Saturday, April 2nd, 5:30pm
Opening Reception: Saturday, April 2nd, 6:00 - 8:00pm
Artist Talk and Reception are open to the public

Kaycee Olsen Gallery is pleased to announce to Adrian Rodriguez with love, a solo exhibition of new work by Los Angeles-based photographer Melanie Willhide, from April 2nd – May 7th 2011.

At 5:30pm, Saturday, April 2nd, the evening will commence with a 20-minute Artist Talk with 3Melanie Willhide as part of the ongoing series “In Conversation with Kaycee Olsen.”

To simultaneously be romanced and deceived by an image has been written, parodied and mythologized throughout recorded time. The Little Match Girl, John Frankenheimer’s film Seconds, Narcissus, even Match.com

Here Willhide presents a cautionary tale about illusion in to Adrian Rodriguez, with love.
The title is a dedication to the person who burglarized the artist’s home in the spring of 2010. He stole and erased the artist’s hard drive. In a twist of fate the computer was returned. Recovery software returned the artist’s digital images corrupted. Rather than attempting to recreate what was lost, Willhide made the bold move to work with the corrupted files. Treating the pixels more like paint, Willhide takes the corrupted image files and augments them. This accident as artwork offers the viewer a formal two for one—both abstraction and realism in the same picture plane.

There is a tension between the edge of the image and its degradation. In one image two bodies are split and shifted; in another a young boy appears to be releasing his spirit from his spine; and in a third, what seem like two cocoons replace the bodies of two smiling women. The incongruous images boast an off-color palette, making the once-impressive digital apparition seem particularly vulnerable to the potential failure of the machines with which we record and create them.

Perhaps a warning against trusting the images of our lives to the digital device—or perhaps finally freeing the photographer from the burdensome conversation around the staged versus the real—Willhide finds new possibilities in an increasingly digital medium. to Adrian Rodriguez with Love marks Willhide’s first solo exhibition in Los Angeles.

Melanie Willhide has an MFA in Photography from Yale University and a BFA in Photography from Rhode Island School of Design. Her work has been covered by The New York Times, The Boston Globe, Time Out magazine and American Photography. Willhide has shown throughout the country from San Francisco and New York to Miami and Boston. She is also the recipient of the 1999 Rhode Island School of Design T.C. Colley Award and the 2002 Yale University Ward Cheney Memorial Award for Technical Proficiency. Willhide’s work is also in several collections, including the Yale University Davenport Collection, the Paul and Barbara Kaben Collection, the Schaffer Collection and the Deschanel Collection.