The dynamic artist Susan Melly is hot off two award wins: she took first place at Gallery H at Phantom Galleries “Art Fusion” exhibition, for “Window Dressing,” a work that is an intrinsic part of her “Mother Machine” series; and she received honorable mention at LA Artcore for her piece “Fertile Crescent.”
Melly’s work is all about the feminine, and female objectification. This is not a hearts and flower world. Rather it’s all about identity, sexuality, power, and yes, industrial machines. The artist was inspired by a discovery of dress patterns and industrial-age sewing machines that were a part of her mother’s estate. Her recent work combines tissue paper dress patterns into images that explore both real and symbolic relationships between women and industry. She uses loosely drawn, even impressionistic images on top of the precise and detailed pattern designs. The clothing industry itself, with its fashion designs and women’s clothing styles, as well as the act of creating fashion through sewing, and the sewing industry itself, are her subjects. Melly uses the history, politics, and literal shapes of that industry to explore a variety of metaphors for a changing society. Antique industrial sewing machines with their attractive, even artistic external decorations symbolize Melly’s strong mother: in her work they’re powerful yet beautiful, tough, yet outwardly decorous. These machines and their continued ability to function decades later is a rich and impressive metaphor for the strength of the women who operated them.
Her piece “Fits Her to a Tea” uses a female mannequin’s bust covered with these precise dress pattern cutouts. The patterns are adorned with impressionistic colored art paper collages and embroidery – including a tea cup – and the inclusion of actual tea bags and a tea set.
This piece is a collaboration with another 825 Gallery artist, Chuka Susan Chesney. The Gallery randomly assigned pairs of artists to collaborate, with often dazzling results. Here, the colorful collages and stitching Chesney created serve as a strong counterpoint to Melly’s work.
This mixed media piece is wonderfully evocative, of the practical woman who uses those tea bags, the rich interior life she holds – the drawings – and the measured, designed, and carefully restricted borders of her life as revealed by the dress pattern cut outs.
In “Tension Adjustment,” this stunning painting features a beautiful woman curled up in an almost-fetal position inside the dominant image of a sewing machine.
“Fertile Crescent” neatly combines a woman who could be an Egyptian Princess overlaying most of a mannequin’s face, with a crescent of dress pattern slashing a curve across her visage. Her neck, body, and the arm that holds her head and torso aloft, are covered with the tissue paper dress patterns.
Part of the solo show “Mother Machine” held at Gallery 825 in April 2015, Melly’s mixed media paintings and sculptures shape the female form with the same provocative mixture of ornate embellishments as on the old-fashioned industrial sewing machines, as well as imbuing them with those machines’ strength. The vintage mannequins themselves provide a certain gravitas, and the dress patterns present an interesting dichotomy. The fragile tissue paper evokes male notions of female delicacy, while the rigidity of the lines and construction suggests a binding up of the female spirit. By drawing on these patterns, adorning them in a variety of ways, Melly appears to be opening a whole new world of expression for these figures, while still celebrating their strength and durability.
In 2015, along with her award winning exhibition at Phantom Galleries H and LA Art Core, and her solo show at Gallery 825, Melly has shown at Palm Springs’ Gallery 446, Las Laguna Gallery, in Laguna Beach, and the Foundry Art Center in St. Charles, Missouri among other locations.
- Genie Davis
