MELISSA HUDDLESTON - Exhibitions - Luis De Jesus Los Angeles

Luis De Jesus Los Angeles is pleased to announce Melissa Huddleston: Primordial Spring, the Los Angeles artist’s first solo exhibition with the gallery, featuring a new body of paintings. The exhibition will be on view June 22 – August 17, 2024, with an opening reception on Saturday, June 22 from 6 to 8 p.m.

Huddleston’s series of paintings on paper immerse the viewer in a luminous, prehistoric swamp populated with single-celled organisms, imaginary archaic life forms, and humanoid amphibian figures. Seen in silhouette, the figures’ complex relationships hover at the edge of narrative. Not quite land, not quite sea, swamps and wetlands represent a mingling of ecologies, a crossing of worlds. Encounters happen in these places that don’t happen anywhere else. The imagery in the paintings teems with mutation, decay, sex, death, and the magnificent messiness of life.

The paintings in Primordial Spring utilize processes adapted from historic print and book arts techniques. Through an experimental monoprint-style method, paint is applied to the surface of a water bath, manipulated, and then transferred to paper. The resulting paintings are dense with organic activity, and buoyant swirls of colors floating with mysterious levity.

Paper marbling techniques are commonly associated with European scriptural arts, as well as the Japanese art of suminagashi. Huddleston’s interest in these processes is informed by revisionist feminist histories of these works on paper that have reassessed their former status as minor arts, craft, or ephemera. Her paintings boldly intersect aspects of these traditions with the idiom and scale of modernist abstract painting.

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. Huddleston works as an Assistant Conservator at the Getty Research Institute. Her solo exhibition The Beautician appeared at the Los Angeles Contemporary Archive in 2016. Group exhibitions include Chapters: Book Arts in Southern California at the Craft Folk Art Museum in Los Angeles, The Collectivists at the Brand Gallery and an artist residency at the Sam and Adele Golden Foundation for the Arts Language of Landscape at the Annenberg Community Beach House, and ¡Dígame! at the Obracadobra Residency in Oaxaca, MX.