Melanie Clemmons is a Dallas-based new media artist whose interdisciplinary practice moves across video, installation, net art, digital fabrication, three-dimensional printing, extended reality, and live visual performance. Her work explores internet culture, speculative futures, digital ethics, and the increasingly complex ways that networked technologies influence identity, communication, behavior, and human relationships.
Clemmons is interested in both the harmful structures embedded within digital culture and technology’s potential to create more thoughtful forms of connection. Her installations often respond to surveillance capitalism, the attention economy, social media, online misinformation, and algorithmic systems. Rather than treating technology as neutral, she examines the cultural values, anxieties, and power structures that shape how it is developed and used.
Alongside this critical approach, Clemmons imagines gentler and more constructive technological futures. Spiritual imagery, healing rituals, digital folklore, internet aesthetics, animated environments, and interactive systems appear throughout her work. By combining familiar devices with unexpected materials and metaphysical references, she creates spaces in which technology may become a tool for reflection, care, and collective experience.
In 2021, the Nasher Sculpture Center presented Likes Charge, Light Tear, its first exhibition devoted to new media art. The hybrid physical and virtual installation included video, interactive sculpture, livestreaming, smartphones, glass bricks, and three-dimensional-printed healing crystals. The exhibition considered the pressures of constant connectivity while proposing slower, more reflective relationships with digital technology.
Clemmons has collaborated with artist Zak Loyd since 2009. Together, they create immersive video, laser, and extended-reality installations, internet-based artworks, live performances, and visual environments for music. Their collaborative practice examines artificial intelligence, online culture, speculative technology, and the unstable boundary between physical and virtual experience.
In 2024, Clemmons and Loyd presented Trophy Club Nissan at Liliana Bloch Gallery in Dallas. The exhibition featured work developed through large language models, deep learning, and text-to-image artificial intelligence platforms. The resulting post-photographic prints, videos, programmable LED signs, fabrics, and laser-etched surfaces examined North Texas suburban culture and the influence of algorithmic filter bubbles on identity, aesthetics, and everyday behavior.
Clemmons has also collaborated with Pussy Riot, producing music videos and performing live visuals during the group’s first North American tour. Her work has been exhibited and screened at the Whitney Museum of American Art through Lorna Mills’s Ways of Something, HeK in Basel, the Nasher Sculpture Center, Women & Their Work, AURORA, Denver Digerati’s Supernova, Light Year in Brooklyn, Echo Park Film Center in Los Angeles, Aggregate Space Gallery in Oakland, and numerous artist-run and experimental spaces.
Clemmons received a Bachelor of Arts in Photocommunications from St. Edward’s University and a Master of Fine Arts in Interdisciplinary Media Arts Practices from the University of Colorado Boulder. She also studied in the Interactive Telecommunications Program at New York University.
She is an Associate Professor of Art in Digital/Hybrid Media and holds the Claire Morris Spaht Chair in the Division of Art at Southern Methodist University in Dallas. Through her teaching and artistic practice, Clemmons contributes to the continued development of new media and technology-based contemporary art in Dallas.
Melanie Clemmons lives and works in Dallas and is represented by Liliana Bloch Gallery. Her work is available through the gallery for Dallas art collectors interested in video art, digital art, artificial intelligence, immersive installation, and emerging approaches to contemporary media.