Words Kyle Hinton Photography Guzman

Published in No 11

Artist Melora Kuhn describes some of the sensible, modern renovation decisions she’s made to her home in Germantown, New York, since moving from the city in 2008. There was the wall between the kitchen and the dining room that she removed, and two doorways and another wall, between the stairs and the living rooms, which she also took down. In her work as a painter and sculptor, too, she’s often taking things apart and putting them back together again. The 1865 house stands proudly alongside the original barn, which serves as her studio and is painted black in heavy contrast to its lofty white-boxed interior. A wall of inspiration displaying old photographs, drawings and masterworks, along with wide shelves arranged with found objects, collectively give you a sense of where she is creatively.

 Kuhn is currently working on a series of monochromatic paintings, interiors mostly. She describes them as a kind of revisionist history to the United States Constitution. "Blueprints of the country," she says. "They're [about] how we need to rework the originals." A series of detailed interior drawings sit on her work bench, brushed in blue ink, corresponding with her finished canvases scattered around her studio. In The Library, 2020, there’s a desk positioned inside of a library and books and papers levitate above its surface, almost frozen in time, as if Kuhn is preparing how best to reposition them to tell her story. Even though they’re all blue, and interiors, there’s a vein carried through from her earlier works.

Throughout much of her painting, Kuhn depicts the tearing away of societal norms or, better, their natural deterioration, portraying eras of both American and European history during great unrest or upheaval, times of war and widespread disease, while simultaneously devising her own history, a reconstruction, even a reparation in some instances.

Whether stark and opposing colonialism with period characters from various turns of century; bourgeois aristocracy with indigenous peoples; or the illumination of a post-civil war era clarity, as exemplified in Photo Booth, 2016, between multiple bodies of work, they’re like sepia portraits taken in times we’ll never fully come to understand, where the figures she paints might have stood still for several minutes in front of an old boxy camera. Now, Kuhn takes it upon herself — as an artist — to tear them up, torch or stain, parse and put back together again for us to consume in ways we might be able.

“I’ve been concentrating on American history and the 19th Century and trying to unravel it and understand how we got to be where we are now. I’m always trying to better understand and recognize the patriarchal language and its thought process, just being able to recognize it, because that’s so deep in there.”

Her painting Letters to Abigail Adams, 2020, features a woman wearing a royal blue colored gown and holding a message — a totem or symbolic element within each painting in this series. Kuhn has placed her in front of Emanuel Leutze’s famous Washington Crossing the Delaware, 1851, which she’s desaturated, recolored a bright powder pink and reenacted, in her more painterly version of the historical masterpiece, in an effort to bring more women of history to the forefront. "While Washington was portrayed in his heroism," Kuhn says, "the women were holding the country together: the farming, the families, the accounts ... the same old story."

For Ellis Island Boy, 2008, Kuhn originally saw a photograph of a boy wearing a perfect suit, and his reconstructed history parlayed into the larger group of portraits. “I just painted him because I was curious about him. Often, if I just find a photo, I will want to paint it to understand it, so that I can let the image go through me more. So, I painted him, and I was like, where did he come from, and I made up this story about the bombed-out house, the disaster that he was obviously leaving, some place. Then as I painted in black and in white, it was as if someone’s psychological space was there with them too. And [questioned] when immigrating here, what are you leaving behind and what are you coming to? That’s what began the series.”

There is also Reflections, a series where Kuhn brings some of these same painterly backdrops used in The Survivors, as well as dominant cardinal figures of judgement, only to disfigure, almost disguise them with a dangling, brightly-lit chandelier, which is so reflective that it becomes the focus of the portrait rather than the influential authority she’s portraying underneath it. “There were these rows of portraits of judges hung along the wall across from me, when I was called to jury duty, and there was a chandelier in the room, placed perfectly over the face of a judge. I was thinking of wealth and how it can blind your ability to make a clear judgement.”

Within this same series, and flowing in and out of past works, there is a group of portraits Kuhn has undertaken in which she paints a seemingly perfect impression of a well-known historical figure, as if she were a painter of the time and commissioned to do so. Only in the way that she does so well, each of them is marked with what at first appear to be blind contour drawings.

It’s only after reading the title, Clara Bewick Colby with Susan B. Anthony, 2018, that you come to understand the connection between the two uniquely different portraits sharing the same canvas. This similarly occurs in His Mark on Her, 2016, and Sally's Mark on Tom, 2016, where perhaps more of her envisioned storytelling is at play. “Just by meeting someone it changes you. We become influenced by everything: our experience with the world, maybe it’s a lover or an abuser, a parent, whoever it is, it’s somebody who changes our whole being so that we become a part of all the people we meet. The lines are all other people.”

In the small Hudson Valley hamlet Kuhn calls home, having arrived from the city not knowing a soul and at time when the town was a bit on the fringes of artistic or creative society, she’s created her own story. And though she’s made it her own, the house is still old, open and airy as well as intimate and insular, with sanded floors left to stain with wear and plaster walls that breathe with aged lime paint residue, now blackened, one of many unexpected discoveries kept as it were to call attention to the house’s storied past.

Here, you imagine Victorian-era congregations in the parlor and baskets of specialties, prepared by the figures in her paintings, being brought up the front porch steps with good tidings. It is no different today, for Kuhn loves to cook and entertain her close friends, gathering under the chandelier in the dining room, where the fireplace glows and its mantle is cluttered with her most special collection, all set between plaster walls that seem alive and well enough to be another guest at the party.

Kyle Hinton is a writer and designer covering art, psychology, culture, and books. He has contributed to Slash, System, and The Last Magazine.  kyle-hinton.com @kyle__hinton

Guzman are regular contributors to UD and are represented by veronique-peres-domergue.net @lesguzman