Beginning as a simple exploration of images as two-
dimensional objects, Mel Bles’ Islands, evolved into a
rhythmic meditation on line, form, light and shape.
The curves and crevices of bodies echo the rippling
slopes of sand dunes, and close-up pro les steeped in
shadow mirror the rolling drama of cloud formations
arching across the sky. The continuous presence of
lines thread the images in Islands together, painted
purposefully across Bles’ nude models to trace their
shapes and movements, subtly recalling the body and
performance art of the 1970s. There are glimpses of
gestures and hands, faces and expressions, but most
often the people we see become mere bodies – sculptural gures enfolded into the images in the same way all
other organic forms are, malleable matter to be used and
reused. Eclipsing in and out of the shadows, these bodies
appear as fragmented parts; islands of their own.
Journeying through an array of classical photographic
tropes – light and dark, shadows and mirrors, the female
nude, the still life and the landscape – Bles conflates
each tradition she encounters into her own process, and
transforms it. With a belief that an image can be graphic
without being ‘hard’, she makes images that probe how
to imbue a photograph with intimacy and softness –
studies on femininity and form away from any sexual or
romantic connotations.
While some images maintain a stark photographic clarity
in what the artist calls their ‘purest form’, others are fed
through an intuitive process of alteration – revisited,
reprinted, rephotographed on an iPhone, taken to a
scanner, or upturned – and their surface textures are
interrupted, stretched and warped in dreamlike and
surreal ways.
An island is both the image of isolation and the stuff of
fantasy too. Bles is our meandering narrator, figuring
out how our bodies slot into the world around us, lone or
entwined. Less personal and more geographic, Islands is an abstract mapping of land, the site of the body and
the planes of photographic surfaces. Binding illusory
glimpses of natural phenomena and the human form,
Islands presents the first forays into Bles’ own quiet,
earthly cosmology.
