From adolescence onward, Melanie Flood (b. Queens, NY) has used the camera to regard herself and the world. Her practice is built upon relentless auto-documentation through which she explores her subjectivity as a woman and engages a critique of the “ideal” female body, while considering broader social scripts surrounding aging, sex, and feminine performance. For Flood, precarity and vulnerability are sources of artistic power that unites her work in a provocative, evolving record of lived experience.

Flood often manipulates subject matter—whether her own body, other people, inanimate objects, or scenes—with reflective mylar, screens, fabric, or studio lights, allowing her to control what is revealed and obscured from the visual field. She also incorporates elements of vernacular photography and iPhone pictures to emphasize the everyday absurdity of dominant beauty standards and commercialized conceptions of womanly “self-care.” Unflinching self portraits and irreverent still lifes encourage viewers to reconsider feminine-coded aesthetics that are usually relegated to the superficial and unserious. Within the realm of her work, Flood demonstrates a total willingness to look, expertly deploying the photographic medium as a strategy for greater understanding and representation.