Melody Tuttle Memorializes Many Selves Through Her Mementos
American painter Melody Tuttle offers a new series of work in her second solo exhibition in Chinatown’s Hyacinth Gallery that honors past lives, embracing the art historical continuum. Steeped in iconology, Tuttle investigates the enactment of memorialization through researching European traditions of memento mori. Often singling in on familiar symbols, Tuttle’s female figures’ relationship to physical objects is made plain, yet subtly heightened by their emotional resonances. Perhaps considered nostalgic symbols, they reach beyond kitsch graphics or lighthearted feminine charms, as Tuttle has a knack for utilizing them as access points for summoning memories within viewers. Not only tapping into formative memories, but also reaching to the root of one’s true self from an earlier chapter of our own lives. The deceivingly simplistic scenes, neither are vacant nor emphasize pathos, as each contain complex layering of art historical tropes, aesthetic legacies of Protestant neo-stoicism, poetic verse from the late Russian Empire, years of processed personal grief, and gratitude for the keepsakes that have seen one through the tumult to fainter days.
Tuttle, deeply inspired by poetry and obscure art historical inspirations, has become a cartographer of the emotional resonance that humble objects exert. Each memento depicted operates on multiple levels with references to accessible design, subcultural connotations, personal memories, and art historical motifs. The lore of the white lighter in its synonymous titled work leaves the protagonist stewing in the wake of a hapless misstep. The ageless beauty of a rose fights to withstand the ravages of time sinking through its neighboring hourglass within How to Hold the Heavy Weight of Now. A hallmark of beauty, love, a thorn-pricked struggle, the tattooed memorialization of love lost, and the inevitability of death all converge in this single object’s symbolic repertoire and emotional expanse. Instantaneously recognizable, yet coy nods to one’s tribe—and simultaneously familiar comforts—which can reach back through time, Tuttle’s repertoire of inanimate companions firmly play the role of secondary characters within each scene. The keepsakes that bore witness to our own fears, hopes, and private rituals—those held close to our hearts—rise to become sites within which we are reconnected with tiny traces of our soul.
Seemingly ordinary additions—an orange rind, a bowl of cherries, a butterfly, or a rose—these objects unlock pathways to invoke viewers’ own experiential knowledge. Each painting is crafted with a nuanced calibration of drawing-in viewers through restrained graphic arrangements that hold space for their own interpretations and connections to take root. The artist does not aim to be the sole arbiter of storytelling within her practice, but Tuttle does build out the emotional foundation and visual framing to contain multiple points of convergence between our past selves, our present longing for earlier periods, and intergenerational cultural legacies connecting today to bygone eras. Yet, the core impetus of the works is fashioning poignant connection and excavating a spark of resonance in the viewer. Additionally, offering a space for reflection, to pause and inhabit the acknowledgement of—and hopefully honor or even grieve—those little reminders of who we once were. Tuttle’s finesse is striking a placid harmony between mystique, indeterminacy, and an alluring aura within each open-ended scene.
Nightscapes and rains are a unifying theme within this body of new work, to capture the specific energetic shift that occurs in those distinct temporary phases of time. Blues steeped in swathes of gray were intended to tone down the chromatic vibrancy of these works to mellow Tuttle’s previous kitschy palette of groovy sunlight, graphic patterns, and flattened spatial planes. The handling of pigment in these combinations feel more fresco-like due to recession of space into nearly hazy backgrounds, as well as a looser application of contour lines defining each figure’s silhouette. The artist is specifically channeling a particular “time and a place [as a] sort of a feeling,” she told me in her studio. Raindrops, ample and rotund, seem to stifle the passage of time. The creaky unfolding of a minute by minute upon the deep cloak of night can seem to possess an eternity within their midst. Which I understand as a familiar expansive rupture of time that she defines as “a vibe”. This upending—or slow unraveling of the hands of time—provides Tuttle with “a homey, cozy, kind of feeling so that’s what I was kind of going with” through this aqueous palette.
From Dutch to Flemish 17th-century Old Masters, Tuttle is inspired by considering—as she told me during a studio visit—“the painters that painted them hundreds of years ago, and how they are not around anymore. Their work is still living on, and contemporary artists are still finding influence in that, while using that influence to make their own work, so I love having that connection as well”. Realist still life painters Pieter Claesz (1597 – 1661), Harmen Steenwijck (1612 – 1656), and Cornelis Norbertus Gijsbrechts (b. ca. 1625/1629 – d. after 1675) specialized in revealing spatial depth through vanitas iconography building upon this legacy of symbols established by earlier Mannerist engraver Jacques de Gheyn II (1565 – 1629). A unifying emblem personifying the passage of one’s lifetime is notably the skull, a pious reminder of divine providence ruling over one’s life to buffer the ego from falling prey to hubris and hedonism. The skull reoccurs as a leitmotif through Tuttle’s newest body of work in the exhibition, accompanied by symbols invoking the passage of time, the impermanence of life, reproductive fertility, as well as the fruits of paradise. This rumination on the temporality of life is explored in Marina Tsvetaeva’s Russian poem from 1910 as buffering hedonism from the perspective of the objects we accumulate, and the inevitable separation from worldly goods upon ascending into a paradise once one dies. In Paradise, the title of Tsvetaeva’s poem as well as the title of the exhibition’s marquee painting, also bears a line inspiring the title of the exhibition as a whole–I’ll Cry About This Earth in Heaven Too.
My memory weighs heavily on my shoulders
I will cry for this earth in heaven too
At this new meeting, words much older
Won’t be kept between us two
…
~ Marina Tsvetaeva, In Paradise (1910) translation by Katia Makarova.
Originating her artistic practice by reconstructing found images of nude women from gentleman’s magazines, the artist collaged each model’s body into dynamically patterned planes. Still legible as singular sexualized forms, these nearly Cubist compositions more acutely re-enact a viewpoint of stolen glances and tactile reminiscences of having actually been intimately involved. This remixing of a baring-it-all frontal shot, not only redirects the male gaze, but also offers an insight into the experiential matrix of inhabiting a female body such as the one offered in “Blue Satin,” 2017. Transitioning this corporeal inquiry into painted compositions, the individuality of Tuttle’s figures were always sublimated to prioritize the connective emblem of a female archetype. Seen from behind or from above, these faceless forms began to emerge first as masked, then compositionally cropped to be headless, and then leaning towards the featured stylized stoic women seen in pieces such as In Paradise and White Lighter. French Baroque painter Georges de La Tour’s (1593 – 1652) deadpan female subjects are instilled with a quirky air about them, which Tuttle thoroughly values and to some extent works into her own female forms. Although Tuttle supplely captures the faintest undertones of aching solemnity, dissociative weariness, or a hard won grounded presence in each of her lone figure’s facial expressions. Each experienced during the artist’s own journey to honor earlier chapters of her own life, which have now prepared her to embrace the decades to come as well as having arrived to a period of grieving defined by gratitude for shared memories and a memorialization of times gone by.
Resistant to a reductive framing for her painted figures, Tuttle consciously removes sartorial indications of era, culture, and geography by leaving each woman within an enduring art historical trope of the reclining female nude. The artist asserts that “I didn’t want to assign a race or a backstory to any of the women I was painting, so by making them visceral without being flesh toned was” a firm resolution to utilize a spectrum of warm tones ranging from orange to red. An intensive utilization of contrasting colors, drawing up Tuttle’s rigorous education in color theory, provides each form a dimensionality and specific separation from their built environment allowing each body to inhabit a greater spatial depth. This series conveys a contextual reference to the full evolution of the artist’s iterations of the female form. Tuttle’s stylized, isolated women allow viewers to reunite with themselves–past selves to be precise–drawn-in by nostalgia, but left with a space to memorialize, and hopefully honor the sedimentary layers of self that we stand upon today.
The act of connecting is core to the artist’s practice, it is a significant method of making meaning in our lives and how Tuttle defines the core function of art. Through this new series of work, Tuttle becomes a conduit to translate her personal experiences processing familial loss through art historical dialogues that preached the precarious state of life’s impermanence. Bringing this enduring conversation into a twenty-first-century context for viewers invites them to enter into an active state of energetically dense reflection steeped in an air of hushed melancholia.
Melody Tuttle: I’ll Cry About this Earth in Heaven Too is open through October 20th, 2024 at Hyacinth Gallery, 179 Canal St #4B, New York, NY 10013.
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