Melanie Bilenker’s art is inspired by Victorian hair-work jewelry. The artist uses her own hair to illustrate moments in her everyday life. In Shaving the artist depicts shaving her legs in the bathtub, a depilatory act that produces the very raw material with which her work is made. To view this scene one must peek through a mother-of-pearl viewfinder that is designed to be worn as a pendant hung from a chain.

Over time, Bilenker’s materials have shifted, and she’s evolved from setting her own hair in plastic to setting it on paper. Her scenes are always made from quotidian details of her own life, and her own hair. The artist uses photographs of herself as source material. Throughout her career her work has celebrated the mundane, and memorialized the passing of time and the ritual acts of everyday life, including the work carried out in domestic spaces like folding laundry, making dinner, or taking a bath. In doing so, the artist makes the personal both political and poetic.