contact@melaniemenard.com
My main interests are subjectivity and inner conflict, alienation and delusions. I investigate through photography and video how an individual’s mental state influences their perception of their experiences and surroundings, and the representation of space as psychologically and historically charged. My photographs are unstaged and taken with long exposure in natural light. My videos are precisely composed and edited in order to achieve a coherent cinematic mood that traps the viewer inside a particular subjective experience.
Two main ongoing photography and video projects I am working on:
The ghost house series was shot at several abandoned houses in Ireland, whose last occupants probably left 10 to 30 years ago. Traces of their lives and aspirations, and of the disillusions and hardships that made them leave their homeland, remained in the form of scattered personal belongings.
In “Discipline and Punish”, Michel Foucault defines “Disciplinary Institutions” as places where people are made useful and obedient through the repression of any deviation from the norm. In this series, I explore places used to make undesirable and/or helpless people disappear discretely such as Magdalene convents (used to imprison women), mental asylums and workhouses. Rather than purely documenting the buildings, I am interested in showing how the long gone inmates keep imprinting these places long after they are dead, and the malevolent aura still cast by those buildings in collective memory.
You have edited the footage you took into a powerful evocation of the Institutions that were used to oppress those deemed unworthy, transgressive or expendable in an Ireland dominated by the power of church and state. You communicated the dread and menace that still clings to these places and transmitted the fragile traces of those who were imprisoned. Well done Melanie.