i have a room with everything
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I Have A Room With Everything
Photographs by Melanie Bonajo
Capricious Publishing is pleased to announce the publication of I Have A Room With Everything, a book of stunningly intimate photographs by Melanie Bonajo. Taken between the years of 1998 and 2005, the images in this exquisitely printed volume present anti-journalistic, documentary style photographs. Some are real, some staged, some of everyday life. All at once they are moving, whimsical, goofy, dark, haunting, romantic, and ultimately revelatory. At times they are painfully alienating, yet deliriously gorgeous and indicative of a fantastical world seen through the eyes, mind and lens of the artist.
In I Have A Room With Everything, traces of intense consciousness overlap reality and trigger Bonajo’s imagination, as well as the viewer’s. “Photography for me is never intended to gain the upper hand,” says Bonajo, “but is a way of sculpting mental life.” For Bonajo, taking the photograph is almost like a ritual, a supreme momentum in which there is an extended awareness of the different layers and meanings of reality.
With series such as I Love My Parents, Action-hero’s, Thank you for hurting me I really needed it, Liberation from Form, Clouds often Cry, and Waiting for Allah, Bonajo worked with fictive interventions. She directs while she depicts. In so doing Bonajo’s work hovers over the border between fact and fiction, between the natural and the artificial, producing images that are sometimes naïve and sometimes self-conscious. The images in the book meld the absurd into the everyday and ordinary. By photographing different people who are close to her, such as her family, friends and acquaintances; the viewer gets to know Bonajo as an artist who likes to play with the world right around her. In orchestrating her subjects, Bonajo achieves a sense of poise without seeming insincere.
About Melanie Banajo
Melanie Bonajo was born in Heerlen, The Netherlands in 1978. In 1998, she moved to Amsterdam and entered the Gerrit Rietveld Academy where she majored in Photography and Fine Arts. Her photographs have been exhibited in major art institutions internationally, such as Institute Neérlandais (Paris), Stedelijk Museum (Amsterdam), SMBA (Amsterdam), Fons Welters (Amsterdam), Foam (Amsterdam), Fette Gallery (Los Angeles), Bongout Gallery (Berlin), MadVickyTea Galley (Paris), Mordern Art Museum (Lublijana), Kohun Museum of Modern Art (Seoul), Photofestival Allepo (Syria). In May 2009 a solo show of her work will go on view at PPOW Gallery in New York. Bonajo was the winner of the Dutch Young Artist Award 2003, and winner of the Bookprice Pup Award 2007. Bonajo was nominated for the Hyeres Photo award 2009. Her work has been published in Capricious, Eye-magazine, Glu, Livraison, Famous Magazine, and Mollusk, among others. She currently is a resident at the Rijksakademie van Beeldende Kunsten in Amsterdam.
About Capricious Publishing
Capricious as a concept indicates whimsicality and impulse, and Capricious as a publishing entity reflects its namesake in terms of creating cultural and artistic projects and publications. Capricious Publishing currently produces three journals: GLU, Famous and Capricious. I Have A Room With Everything is the second artist book published by Capricious. The first book, The Known World, by Sophie Mörner and Anne Hall, was released in October 2008. Capricious has also made several special edition projects in the past including: LTTR, Screen Capricious, and a VoodooEros CD compilation. It has recently begun issuing GLU Music #1 (on CD) and a line of wearable items as well.
