Melinda Hackett

Reef Painting #5

2021

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.