In a way, who isn’t afraid, just a little bit, of flowers? We may fear their incredible fragility, of losing them to an all-too-quick death, to knowing their perfection is ephemeral and their beauty so temporary – an aching reminder of our own mortality.
However, for artist Susan Melly in her new Emerging Fear of Flowers now at LAAA ‘s Gallery 825 in West Hollywood, her emerging fear was something different, risen from over two years of COVID-19 pandemic isolation. During that time period, Melly’s husband brought her a weekly bouquet of flowers from an open air market. As her own statement informs viewers “As my anxiety blossomed, my art making changed and became more abstract and colorful to ward off my dark feelings. Each work is embedded with a hint of humor – and the number 19 – as an homage to coping mechanisms, even as familiar sources of comfort counterintuitively transform into a strange beauty that is tinged with the edge of the unknown.”
After about a year of receiving the flowers, despite the loving intention of bringing beauty and romance to her life, she began to ask hereslf if she would be “condemned” to receiving the flowers every single Friday for the rest of her life, indicating that the pandemic would never end. The blossoms blossomed – into increased anxiety, alleviated through her art. As viewers we can witness this progression in her new body of work, and revel in its layers, as fragile-seeming as flowers themselves.
The works of course make use of Melly’s signature use of vintage tissue paper dress patterns, something that she terms an “integral part of my practice and personal history…” As a mixed media artist, the LA-based Melly creates work that includes paintings, assemblage-based sculptures, and installations. In this latest body of work, there is a powerful new energy as these flowers morph with the artist, spin discs on an old Victrola record player, weep, rail in anger, whine in frustration, sing, and seethe. Do flowers mourn their entrapment in bouquets? Do they discuss day to day travails as they grow in the garden, rage and wish to curse those who pick them? While we may never know, here Melly certainly posits that they might.
Within the primarily paint and mixed media on canvas works are a variety of sculptural pieces. While some stand alone, a vintage sewing machine, a male figure bearing flowers, “Hanging Out,” is a wall scupture. It emerges like a being encased in and protruding from the wall itself, a partial mannequin entrapped despite a glowing heart and uterus at its center, sheathed and layered with the dress patterns.
The titular “Emerging Fear of Flowers” is a colorful mix of the tissue patterns, acrylic, and art paper on canvas. While a hand holds a cocktail glass in the right corner, center stage is an alien looking three pronged flower that seems to have grown eyes, and one prong is looking and leaning and reaching ominously toward that hand. The viewer can’t help but think of Little Shop of Horrors and Audrey, that musical’s violently sentient plant. It is a large work, vibrant with indigo and burgandy; the human hand, however, is so white it could easily belong to a person confined from the sunlight in which these flowers gained a robust if menacing vitality.
Melly’s “Cut Stems” also makes use of the tissue dress patterns combined with acrylic. These highly geometric flowers have sharp edged like wind mills and are exhibiting just emerging facial features.
With “Enter Covid,” what’s blossoming here appears to be the shape of COVID itself, entering via a kind of conduit into an abstract human vessel. Layers of white on white recall bandages, sheets, and fog, as if a ghostly landscape now enveloped us all.
Quoting Charles Baudelaire with the title “Evil Comes up Softly Like a Flower,” Melly uses acrylic, charcoal, and dress patterns to make one of the most ominous, yet still amusing, paintings in this series. Here, flowers have teeth and raging faces.
But they are comfortably more relatable in “Dandelion Wine,” in which a dandelion tears out its seeds in frustration.
And we can feel intense empathy for the sad blooms in works such as “Un-Still Life,” in which a lavendar, daisy-like flower has thorns and weeps purple blooded tears.
In another work, the artist herself melds or morphs into a flower, a pale periwinkle and peacefully meditative one, in “Portrait of the Artist as a Young Lotus.” Surrounded by a geometric abstract patterns, the figure is part statue, part flower, absorbed fully in the act of blooming, yet trapped in stillness.
Perhaps, we can hope that our time in pandemic shut down can allow us to achieve a similarly mesmerized state. Viewing Melly’s delicate, lovely, and unsettling works may just have that effect.
Melly’s work is beautifully paired with the light-based blend of Richard Slechta’s photography and art, Incompressible Flow; Chris Madens’ glowy dimensional assemblies, The Covid Kiss; and a group show, Felicitious, an all-media compilation depicting the current zeitgeist.
The exhibition is on view through June 24th. Gallery 825 is located at 825 N. La Cienega. Melly is offering curated visits; the gallery is also open by appointment at other times, reach out at gallery825@laaa.org.
Genie Davis – images provided by the artist