Melissa Auf der Maur excavates the past | Canada Voices

Melissa Auf der Maur is, by her own admission, a little witchy. She has red hair. She believes in magic. As a teenager, she dreamed of mystical pyramids and three-dimensional sound. She received messages in her sleep, telling her to play music. In 1994, when she was 19, she met Smashing Pumpkins frontman Billy Corgan, who told her that she might be in his band one day; five years later, she was. She was hand-picked out of rock music obscurity by walking tornado Courtney Love to join Love’s band, Hole. She had visions of a winged demon that threatened to consume her if she didn’t redeem her creative freedom. She foresaw the advancing forces of corporatization and digitization on the alternative music scene, and she walked away.

She had the prescience to document all of this, in thousands upon thousands of photographs. These images, along with videos, tour ephemera and newly recorded music, are now on exhibition for the first time at the Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto. The show, My ’90s Rock Photographs, features a selection of Auf der Maur’s more than 15,000 pictures from the last analog decade. They span her five years as a bassist with Hole and one year with the Smashing Pumpkins.

The show is but one piece of a larger excavation project: Auf der Maur’s memoir, Even the Good Girls Will Cry, was released in March (on St. Patrick’s Day, her birthday); a photo book, published by DelMonico Books and the AGO, is out this month; and a feature documentary about Auf der Maur and her photo archive by Banger Films, The National Film Board and the CBC is in production.

“I tried to make it happen here,” Auf der Maur said when I met her at her apartment in Montreal in early June (she lives full-time in Hudson, New York, with her daughter and husband, filmmaker Tony Stone). She would have preferred to hand her archive over to a hometown institution, but it didn’t work out that way. The comment might sound like a snub to Toronto, but spending even a few minutes with Auf der Maur reveals a deep, almost cosmic, affinity for Montreal. “The city, she raised me,” is a recurring motif in her memoir and photo book.

Auf der Maur did not want to be a rock star. Despite her rabid music fandom (one hot summer in 1991, she went to a show practically every single night), she had been devoted to photography since age 13 and later studied self-portraiture at Concordia University. “I had always wanted and planned on being a photographer, but this music thing kept grabbing me,” Auf der Maur said. She was wary of big record labels and of America. “My mother left the U.S. in the ’60s, so I was raised being told the American people have the bum end of the stick.” When Love called her up to ask her to join Hole, at Corgan’s recommendation, Auf der Maur politely declined. It was August of 1994. “Will you just get on a plane,” Love said, “and tell me to my face that you don’t want to be in my band?” She got on the plane.

Auf der Maur joined Hole in the wake of death, destruction, demons and drugs. Kurt Cobain, Courtney Love’s husband and Nirvana’s enigmatic frontman, died by suicide the same week that Hole’s acclaimed album Live Through This was released. The group’s previous bassist, Kristen Pfaff, died of a heroin overdose months later. Nirvana fans and the media blamed Love for Cobain’s death, attacking her with the kind of misogynistic ruthlessness popular culture is only now reckoning with. Love was left with the couple’s toddler, Frances Bean, an eviscerated spirit, a broken band. In some of the most striking images in the book, a fresh-faced Auf der Maur documents her stay in Love’s Seattle guest room overlooking the garage, still encased in security tape, where Cobain took his life with a shotgun.

Ten days later, she’s playing in front of thousands of fans at the Reading Festival in the U.K., one of the oldest and largest music events in the world. It was Auf der Maur’s first show with Hole, her first outside of the tiny Montreal clubs she’d played with her hometown band, Tinker, where, as she writes in the memoir, she recognized every face in the crowd.

What follows are years of world tours, criss-crossing the globe performing in places as far as Tuktoyaktuk, Northwest Territories, and Fremantle, Australia.

Burning up road in tour buses, killing hours backstage and watching endless hotel room TV was often exhausting and lonely, but it could also be joyful and exhilarating. Auf der Maur, never without her camera, captured what it looked like, felt like: A frozen pink martini on a laminate table in Somewhere, USA, Love eating strawberry cake backstage at Lollapalooza 1995, a half-eaten room service tray in an anonymous hotel suite. There’s a sense in the images of happenstance, of accident. But this is a kind of deception, a photographic sleight of hand.

“It’s clear that the photographs, though they have this casual feeling about them, are very much not casual products,” says Sophie Hackett, the AGO’s curator of photography who co-curated the exhibition. “They are the products of someone who went to art school, who thought about being a visual artist, who developed her passion for the visual arts at the same time as she’s developing her passion for music.”

Auf der Maur’s self-portraits – particularly self-portraits in mirrors – are a throughline. They serve as both daily check-ins amid the chaos and instability of touring as well as opportunities to experiment with form. In one of the artist’s favourite images, Self-Portrait in House of Mirrors, USA, 1995, Auf der Maur, wild red hair falling against her yellow T-shirt, is eerily spliced into multiples by intersecting mirrors. In another conceptual series, she captures herself in various stages of crawling across the turquoise carpet of a Copenhagen hotel room.

“It harkens back to an artist that was very formative for her, Francesca Woodman, who was an American woman working in the ’70s,” Hackett says. “I feel like she’s kind of crawling out of her skin in this moment, trying to crawl out of the situation, and also animate a pretty banal hotel room.”

Jim Shedden, the AGO’s curator of special projects and co-curator of the show, explains that Auf der Maur’s self-portraits are presented in the exhibition as a counterpoint to her series of audience images. “For her, that’s a kind of yin and yang,” he says. “They were both generative and regenerative for her. She had a really great relationship when she was onstage playing for the audience, but she also needed to be by herself and creating.”

As a grown woman, a mother to a teenage daughter, what does Auf der Maur see in these photographs? For years, that period of her life was so overwhelming that she couldn’t go near it. Now, diving back in, she wanted to “understand what I had left behind and what I had gone running from, because, in many ways, I did go running from the ’90s,” she said. “It was such a wonderful but overwhelmingly saturated decade of passion and pain, and obviously music, but addiction and death – a zeitgeist moment in our generation and the end of a millennium.”

Then and now, she understood she was living through a historic but fleeting moment, and that if she didn’t record it all, it would slip away into oblivion. This, Auf der Maur was saying with her camera, is what it was like to be a young woman in rock music at a time when the genre was dominated by the men of Nine Inch Nails, Nirvana and Soundgarden. This is being an artist. This is being alive.

“I’m utilizing my experience in that decade as an offering to anybody that cares as a study, an archaeological dig,” Auf der Maur said. She wants to understand how we got from that place of analog and DIY to this one, where a small number of tech oligarchs own all our time and creativity. “This is my question,” she said. “I owe it to the future. I owe it to my daughter.”

Fashion editor: Nadia Pizzimenti. Makeup and hair by Ronnie Tremblay for Dior Beauty/P1M.ca. Styling assistant: Liza Volodchenko. Photographed in Montreal and at Crowsnest Studio.

Image at top: Electric Feathers dress, Hat from Lilliput Hats. Earrings and bangles from Michelle Ross. Tights, vintage heels, Auf der Maur’s own.