Melody Tuttle: I’ll Cry About This Earth in Heaven Too

Inspired in part by the Vanitas symbolism frequently associated with still-life painters in the Dutch Baroque era, Melody Tuttle’s new series of paintings counterpose her sensuous imagery and alluring figurations with contemplative settings and ominous iconography often relating to ephemerality, futility, and mortality. Each of Tuttle’s scenes engage a material that might blur the line between attraction and repulsion—notably a beautiful reflection in proximity to an emblem of the passage of time while several figures playfully consider the art-historical Memento Mori of a human skull. The title of the exhibition derives from a poem by Marina Tsvetaeva, a Russian writer whose personal biography matched the morose tone of her literature and laments that, even after death, life’s tragedies should still be mourned, a reference that reinforces the fragility of earthly triumphs, the inevitability of suffering, and the enormous gravity of personal loss.

Contrary to the crowded compositions of 17th century Dutch masters though, Tuttle situates her grave objects within minimal domestic interiors or pastoral American landscapes, adorning these contemplative scenes with subtle geometric patterns and striking coloration strategies. A generous modernist influence of broad formalism and bold imaginative hues in Tuttle’s paintings complicates the symbolic logic of dark, linear Baroque realism. In Tuttle’s compositions cigarettes and peeled fruit connote freedom and abundance as well as temporality and deterioration. Bunny Rabbits and butterflies entertain Tuttle’s moribund figures, emphasizing that, through a contemporary lens, mortality and existence are represented simultaneously in this symbolic tactic, invoking the grand totality of the knowable world within the inevitable limitation of time. The visual elicitation of these supposed oppositions—beauty and decay, ephemerality and persistence, or life and death—implies multitudes, the space in which tragedy is often accompanied by the infinite possibilities of renewal. 

Melody Tuttle (b. 1985 Des Moines, IA) received a BFA from Rhode Island School of Design in 2011 and an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2017. Tuttle has recently been included in group exhibitions at Hashimoto Contemporary, New York, Hyacinth Gallery, New York, and Monya Rowe Gallery, New York. She has presented solo exhibitions at Thierry Goldberg, New York, UTA Artist Space, Los Angeles, and Great State Gallery, Chicago. This is her second solo exhibition with Hyacinth.