Mélina Bismuth explores urban landscapes collecting photographs of subjects that embody the ephemeral, the fragile, the vulnerable as well as regeneration. She portrays the “screens” that protect construction or renovation sites and hide from view - scaffold sheetings (series Rebuild) or shop windows blotted with white chalk (series Blank) - or the skies reflected upon windows or any surface in the city (Both Sides Now).

She questions the barriers between photography and painting, through stills and photocollages. Her art invites to slow looking.

Her research is nurtured by the Japanese aesthetics of wabi-sabi, embracing the imperfect, valuatuing mundane objects that gradually deteriorate, get constrained, worn by time. She captures insignificant objects, damages, hindrances. Her photographs highlight ephemeral details, textures, flaws, marks of use of the subject, the memory of a particular moment and light with its actual color (no retouch), thus seizing both the outside and the inside worlds, public and intimate. 

Her artistic expression is rooted in the word «re-build». First a long process of de-construction (fragmenting the subject in time and space through shootings over the years). Then a meaningful reconstruction: elaborately assembling photographs. She’s inspired by Vasarely’art of curving square modules, the richness of multi views and dimensions in Cubism and David Hockney’s photocollages. 

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Collections of fragments of memory are at stake as her practice stretches space and time. The Rebuild series testifies of 6 years wandering through more than 40 cities (Paris, Bordeaux, Nantes, Barcelona, Bilbao, Porto, Berlin, Los Angeles…) thus collecting thousands of photographs. Some artworks gather photographs shot over 6 years, such as the 600 «distanced skies» of the installation «The river flows in you».

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In her dynamic assembling process, each picture is carefully selected for its hues, textures, lines, shadows to bring consistency of links, fluidity or create ruptures between close images thus structuring the whole photocollage. As if viewing through a rotating kaleidoscope, all pieces of her photographic series are made of the same material (e.g. photographs of scaffold sheetings), but each artwork reflects a different structure, color, composition, and is animated by a different movement and emotion. 

Her art offers a kinetic experience: the mise en abyme of hundreds of images in the image triggers the movement of the viewer. After a first glance at the overall artwork, the viewer approaches to discover dozens or hundreds of individual pictures, his eyes move from one to another one. As he steps back again, the vision of the whole takes another meaning.