Inchworms © Melinda Hurst Frye
Melinda Hurst Frye makes pictures in the dirt. In her latest series, Underneath, worms, caterpillars, beetles, snails and anonymous animal skeletons intermingle with stringy roots and soil that are simultaneously mysterious and hyper real. They at once resemble homages to narrative painting and large scale Natural History museum dioramas, giving a private view into the world beneath our feet. The Seattle-based photographer creates these images in her yard - not with a camera, but with a flatbed scanner, rigging it to a power supply inside her house, and letting its slow, ultra-high resolution scan a landscape rarely explored with such intimacy. In her own words, “The surface is not a border, but an entrance to homes, nurseries, highways and graveyards.” In time for her solo exhibition, up through August at Seattle’s CORE Gallery, we spoke with Hurst Frye about the ideas and process behind this new work.