Melissa_Magnuson_Arizona2016

I’m an American artist, born and raised in Mississippi, now based in France after several years living and working in London UK. I move often between Europe and the United States, and that distance – geographic and cultural – has become part of how I see.
 
My work moves between photography, video, and sound, made primarily with large and medium format analog cameras. Land, power, and identity are recurring threads, and most of my projects are built slowly, in close relationship with the communities I photograph.
 
For the past ten years I’ve been working on it’s not about the land, a long-form project developed in close collaboration with families of the San Carlos Apache tribe in Arizona. Mississippi turns the lens the other way – a return to the place I grew up, seen from a completely different perspective after years abroad: the people, the culture, the landscape, all newly unfamiliar. Nothing is Foreign to Us sits somewhere between the two, made over extended time in a smelter town set against a nearby ski resort, where I move through the community as an outsider trying to understand a place shaped by very different economies living side by side.
 
I completed my BA in Fine Art and Art History at Goldsmiths and my MA in Photography at the Royal College of Art, both in London. My work has been exhibited at the BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art, Tate, and as part of Bloomberg New Contemporaries. For a full list of exhibitions and education, see my CV.

Melissa Magnuson CV