Photo by Molly Tierney.
Melissa Huddleston (b.1981, Elm Springs, AR) lives and works in Los Angeles. She received her B.A. from Western Washington University, Bellingham, WA, where she studied painting under Ed Bereal. Huddleston’s paintings are steeped in historic print and papermaking processes and suffused with her ruminations on primordial origins and the sublime happenstance of life. Through an experimental monoprint-style method, paint is not applied, but transferred, through water baths to achieve layered organic shapes, swooshes, and swirls of opalescent color floating with mysterious levity. Huddleston’s processes are informed by the cultural, social, and feminist histories of works on paper and its previous segmentation from fine arts materials, with associations to minor arts, craft, and ephemera. Paper marbling is commonly connected with ancient Asian and European scriptural arts as well as the Japanese art of suminagashi. Huddleston’s paintings intersect aspects of these traditions with the idiom of modernist abstract expressionist painting.
Huddleston is a member of the board at Monte Vista Projects and works as an Assistant Conservator at the Getty Research Institute. Solo exhibitions include The Drops and Primordial Spring, Luis De Jesus Los Angeles, and The Beautician, Los Angeles Contemporary Archive. Group exhibitions include Chapters: Book Arts in Southern California at the Craft Folk Art Museum in Los Angeles, The Collectivists at the Brand Gallery. Huddleston has been an artist in residence at The Sam and Adele Golden Foundation for the Arts, New Berlin, NY. Her work is held in the special collections of the Getty Research Institute and MoMA library, and has been featured in the publications Artforum, XTRA, L.A. Weekly, and Hyperallergic.
