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Melissa Auf der Maur Captures the Grunge and Chaos of the ‘90s in New Photo Exhibition
DeVito’s photo is amongst many famous faces, including Parker Posey, Reese Witherspoon, Chloë Sevigny, Adam Sandler, Drew Barrymore and Auf der Maur’s former bandmates: Hole’s Courtney Love and Billy Corgan of The Smashing Pumpkins.
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The images are plastered on a wall in the Montreal-born, New York-based artist’s new photography exhibit, My ‘90s Rock Photographs, at Toronto’s Art Gallery of Ontario (AGO). Spanning from 1991 to 2001, it captures the rambunctious spirit of being a musician at the turn of the millennium, when Auf der Maur was moving through the centre of alternative rock while documenting it from behind a camera.
Melissa Auf der Maur, Self-Portrait in Mirror with Hole,Backstage, Lollapalooza, USA, 1995 © Melissa Auf der Maur
With a camera in one hand and bass in the other — both of which she calls her “north stars” — Auf der Maur spent the decade touring the globe, documenting what happened onstage, backstage, in hotel rooms and everywhere in between. The exhibit pays homage to what she describes as “the last analogue decade.” More than 200 photographs are displayed across three rooms at the AGO from September 2026 to June 2027.
“I am radically grateful for the Art Gallery of Ontario [for] being the first to embrace my '90s rock archive of photographs,” she says, sharing that the process began two years ago. “I came with boxes of snapshots, and we engaged immediately,” she explains. “[I sent] scans upon scans of the thousands and thousands [of photos], and we have been digging through them for two years to give you this.”
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Auf der Maur was Hole’s bassist from 1994 to 1999, before joining The Smashing Pumpkins during the final stretch of the band’s original run in 2000.
Melissa Auf der Maur, Self-Portrait on Stage with theSmashing Pumpkins, Cape Town, South Africa, 2000. ©Melissa Auf der Maur
Before becoming a member of the ‘90s groups, Auf der Maur studied photography at Montreal’s Concordia University. Determined to maintain her artistry on the road, she brought point-and-shoot 35mm cameras everywhere, taking Polaroids and lo-fi video clips, often using one-hour photo labs to develop her film — a decision she made in reaction to the rise of the internet and mass media.
“I'd buy a puffy family album, and I would process the film at the local photo lab, and I would make selections, and these were my little microcosm artworks,” she says. “I could feel the corporate digital tentacles coming in and co-opting the counterculture and turning it into mass media [and] mainstream consumable goods. I wanted to be sure that I witnessed it so that the future could see what happened at the turn of the millennium.”
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While Auf der Maur’s archive included 15,000 photos, the exhibition was whittled down to just 200.
Melissa Auf der Maur, Self-Portrait with Hole, Lollapalooza,USA, 1995. © Melissa Auf der Maur
“It was a long process,” she admits. “I knew I had to tell the whole story. There's the on-stage story and there's the [story] inside a hotel room reflecting on what life has become. Then there is the fellow travelers' story, which is all the exciting people I met along the way.” Does she have a favourite photo? “ Impossible. No way. You can't have a favourite of 15,000.”
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Auf der Maur’s exhibit focuses on her years of ‘90s rock chaos, but a handful of photos predate that. In the summer of 1993, she met Billy Corgan at Montreal’s Les Foufounes Électriques, which she says was “ the night that changed my life.” Her local band, Tinker, had opened for the group on the Pumpkins’ Siamese Dream Tour. “This is the moment on the side stage where he says: ‘You're a great bass player, and one day you'll be in my band.’ And I was exactly 10 years later.”
Melissa Auf der Maur, Self-Portrait with Billy Corgan, SideStage, Siamese Dream tour, Club Metropolis,Montreal,1993. © Melissa Auf der Maur
She walks over to a glass case, housing a treasure trove of artifacts from her twenties, including a tattered phone book with numbers for Geffen Records, Corgan’s management, D'arcy Wretzky of The Smashing Pumpkins, Dave Grohl — whom she briefly dated in the late ‘90s — and Debbie Googe from My Bloody Valentine. “This was my window into the [music] world, and my connecting tissue.”
My ‘90s Rock Photographs is an extension of the world that Auf der Maur immersed fans in with her memoir, Even The Good Girls Will Cry, released earlier this year. The exhibition’s photographs have been collected in a book produced in collaboration with the AGO. Calling it “ a midlife resurrection of a woman who has come and gone into many chapters of her life,” she explains that the project fuses her artistic worlds. “It's integrating all of my coming of age as an artist, both photographer and musician.”
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The world-building continues with the exhibition’s Bass Womb Room installation, a mirrored pyramid featuring video and set to music written and recorded by Auf der Maur. It features audio samples and demos she recorded on a four-track tape recorder in the ’90s and has been released as a standalone project.
Melissa Auf der Maur, Mirror Kissing Girls, Montreal, 1993.© Melissa Auf der Maur
At 54, Auf der Maur is spending considerable time with her past, but she is careful not to frame the exercise as nostalgia. “It’s an invitation for anyone of any age and place to step back into the world we once all shared, which was an analogue world. In that analogue is the very fibre of our humanity.” But she’s careful not to call it nostalgic: “Sometimes you need to look at the past to know how we want the future to be.”
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