Project Room: You Should Smile More: Melody Tuttle
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RHODES is pleased to present You Should Smile More, a new exhibition of paintings by American artist Melody Tuttle.
Continuing Tuttle’s exploration of performed femininity, privacy and the quiet rituals of everyday life, the exhibition turns its attention towards the moments that exist just before and after performance: dressing, undressing, concealment and solitude.
Tuttle’s paintings have long centred on women caught within intimate, often solitary moments. Rendered in saturated hues and set against dreamlike landscapes and interiors, her figures inhabit spaces that feel both familiar and surreal. In You Should Smile More, Tuttle moves further into the domestic interior, creating scenes in which architecture, light and the body become closely intertwined.
Rather than constructing narratives with clear beginnings or conclusions, Tuttle is interested in the atmosphere surrounding a gesture. A woman stands before a mirror, dresses, undresses or withdraws into the privacy of her surroundings. These familiar actions become sites of observation, where the distinction between private experience and performed identity begins to blur. The paintings hold their subjects in moments of suspension, suggesting something has happened, or is about to happen, without revealing precisely what.
This attention to performance extends to the ways femininity is constructed and experienced. The exhibition’s title, You Should Smile More, draws on a familiar directive that appears innocuous but carries with it a set of expectations about how women should look, behave and present themselves. Tuttle does not illustrate this phrase literally. Instead, it operates as an underlying pressure within the paintings, bringing questions of appearance, self-presentation and observation into the private spaces her figures inhabit.
Light plays an important role throughout the new series. Windows, doorways and reflected illumination create shifting boundaries between interior and exterior, exposure and concealment. Tuttle’s use of warm, intense colour gives these spaces a sense of heightened reality, while her carefully composed figures remain absorbed in their own private worlds. The result is an atmosphere that is at once peaceful and uneasy, where the ordinary rituals of daily life acquire a quiet psychological intensity.
Tuttle’s approach to the female figure is similarly attentive to the tension between visibility and privacy. Her women are rarely presented as conventional portraits or subjects for the viewer’s gaze. Instead, they are absorbed in their own actions, turning away, looking inward or existing momentarily outside of performance. This inwardness creates a sense of self-possession, continuing Tuttle’s interest in female identity and self-reliance while allowing the paintings to remain open-ended.
Melody Tuttle’s work harnesses the narrative potential of painting to consider the complexities of contemporary female experience. Her paintings occupy the space between observation and introspection, using colour, atmosphere and gesture to transform familiar moments into something more ambiguous. With You Should Smile More, Tuttle continues to ask what it means to be seen, to perform, and to have a private self that exists beyond the expectations of others.
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Selected works
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Collecting
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