Melinda Hackett
Blue Tree
2022

About the Item

Hackett’s paintings defy popular convention. They are not figurative, decorative, representative, or even completely abstract. While it is hard to tie them to any one style or movement, they manage to be a part of all of them. Hackett’s work is influenced by pattern, midcentury design, art of indigenous peoples, and the art and craft movement, combined with a loose examination of the natural world. She creates a visual environment that is both recognizable yet strangely mysterious. While steeped in art history and influenced by a range of artists from Miro to Arthur Dove, Charles Burchfield, Agnes Pelton, Florine Stettheimer Sonia Delaunay and Hilma af Klimt, among many others, these drawings and paintings are pure inventions of a world as seen in her mind’s eye, full of natural possibilities and visual playgrounds. In Hackett’s paintings, color investigation is used as a vehicle to illustrate the biomorphic forms that populate the picture plane. The colors speak for themselves while the forms explore their own societies where they can be seen as stand ins for the human condition. Each painting begins with a purely spontaneous wash of color and slowly comes into focus as forms intuitively make their way into and onto the surface. As the forms develop, a push and pull of the near and far is established, like the view through a microscope or through a telescope. Hackett’s work makes us question whether we are looking at a micro world or a greater world outside of our universe…or perhaps they are the same thing? Melinda Hackett was born in and currently resides in New York. She holds a Master of Fine Arts degree from Parsons/The New School, NY, and a Bachelor of Fine Arts from Hobart William Smith Collage, NY. Her work has been included in solo exhibitions at Charles Cowles, NY; John Molloy Gallery, NY; MM Fine Art, NY; Julie Keyes Gallery, NY; Hidell Brooks Gallery, NC, among others. Her paintings are in the collections of the Parrish Art Museum, NY; Fidelity Bank, MA; the Mill Reef Club, Barbuda, as well as numerous private collections. Hackett attended a printmaking residency at the Vermont Studio Center from 2008-2010 and has been an artist in residence at Emergency Arts, NY since 2006.

Creator:
Melinda Hackett (American)
Creation Year:
2022
Dimensions:
Height: 62 in (157.48 cm)Width: 46 in (116.84 cm)
Medium:
Oil,Archival Paper
Movement & Style:
Abstract
Period:
2010-
Condition:
Gallery Location:
New Orleans, LA
Reference Number:
1stDibs: LU110210833012
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Melinda Hackett

Melinda Hackett is a mid-career New York Artist. She received her BA at Hobart and William Smith Colleges and MFA at Parsons School of Design. Her paintings refer to organic space and unfixed time. To call them landscapes would be misleading since they are poetic inventions of her imagination, and reference the world of nature rather than depict it literally. One of her purposes in making paintings is to transport the viewer to a necessarily foreign place, where nature can be experienced without knowing it fully, and where reality is communicated through the senses. Hackett’s paintings represent both states, the near, the far, the view through a telescope, the view through a microscope, the sheltering sky, the intimate forest. It creates worlds full of images that float, hover, creep, spin, hang, roll or sleep in corners. The images come from an internal source. They contain a vital impulse and are alive as if subjected to breezes, weather and climatic conditions. It also represents states of nonlinear time. It is less than a singular event is taking place than that a group of different objects is moving through the picture plane at various rates of speed and in opposite directions, some gliding slowly and others whirring as if in a blender. Nature is not in a state of decay, nor is it symbolic or nostalgic for the past. The paintings are largely fragmentary in that they exist in one moment, so do they exist in one torn swatch of space. There is a sense that the activity continues outside the borders of the paintings as the forms flirt with the edges or get chopped off by them. Some forms are only just coming into being while others have already 'come out' and some just like to watch. Under their inability to be fully identified, they remain in the realm of the poetic, a sum of images to form a whole, and the way they relate to each other is meant to be read experientially and not categorically. If there is a story to tell, it is up to the viewer to tell it.