Luis De Jesus Los Angeles invites you to a special Artist-led Walkthrough of Melissa Huddleston: The Drops. We will have refreshments and an interactive walkthrough format where we can engage in active discussions as Melissa shares her insights on her process and significant themes and topics in her work. The walkthrough will be held Saturday, May 30, from 2-3 pm, with refreshments beginning at 1:30 pm.
About the Exhibition:
The Drops situates Melissa Huddleston’s paintings within the legacies of California’s Light and Space and Feminist art movements, balancing formal precision with intimacy and organic growth. Developed during the artist’s pregnancy, the works evoke themes of fertility, transformation, and becoming through concentric forms, luminous color, and delicate interactions of paint. Circular and ovoid shapes oscillate between the celestial and biological—suggesting cells, eclipses, eggs, and bodies—while meditating on creation and division at life’s most elemental level.
The exhibition extends into a mural-scale installation of works on paper painted in a water bath. Through the artist’s repetition of a sequence of movements and paint application, working with the variabilities of the water’s response allows secondary patterns to emerge through their juxtaposition. Their interplay can feel almost cinematic, suggesting motion, deep water, and flickering light. Whisper-thin and quietly radiant, Huddleston’s Drops paintings reward slow looking, emphasizing process not as a fixed moment, but as an ongoing state of emergence.
About the Artist:
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 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.
