STUDIOS 3026 NEWSLETTER ARCHIVE

By Sam Spiegel

Melinda describes her current studio practice as being in what she calls “compost mode.”

When I asked what she was working on, she paused before answering, choosing her words carefully. “I’m revisiting completed projects,” she said. “Floating things together. Seeing how materials and themes connect.”

Inside her studio, that process is immediately visible. Works from different periods converse with one another. Installations, photographs, translucent constructions, and collages that appear distinct at first glance but share a common language rooted in light, perception, and transformation. 

“Photo-driven,” she explained, then clarified. “Photo meaning light. Light-driven.”  

Across decades of making, Melinda has returned again and again to materials that allow light to pass through: surfaces that are  neither fully opaque nor fully transparent. Translucency, in her work, becomes more than a visual quality; it becomes a way of thinking.

In a side conversation, she described the distinction that guides much of her thinking: translucency is “a little muddled. It’s interrupted,” while transparency allows clear visibility, like looking through glass.

“Transparency relates to honesty,” she said. “Seeing through to what’s really going on in front of us.”

That tension between clarity and interruption appears throughout her practice. Nothing is entirely hidden, yet nothing is completely revealed. For the viewer, meaning arrives gradually, shaped by perception rather than clear instruction.

One of the most distinctive elements of Melinda’s work began almost accidentally: with tea bags.

Melinda identifies strongly as a conceptual artist, though her work never feels detached from material experience.

“As much as I stand and make stuff,” she explained, “I sit and think about stuff.”

Ideas populate first; materials follow. Her projects range from environmental and political commentary to installations exploring shelter, fragility, and perception. Clouds constructed from tea bags hang suspended in space. Found metal structures become armatures for layered translucent surfaces. Photographs of fog and glaciers evolve into studies of uncertainty and shifting scale.

Often, the materials find her before she finds them.

“I find things in alleys,” she said with a laugh. “Sometimes I’m on my way to yoga and I have to stop the car because I see something that calls to me.” These discovered objects become frameworks for investigating interruption and visibility.

A turning point in her practice emerged during a trip to Alaska, when grounded helicopters forced her family to improvise travel plans. A small plane carried them between glaciers, allowing her to photograph landscapes where sky, water, and land dissolved into one another.

The resulting images disrupted scale and orientation, dissolving clear boundaries between sky, water, and land.

“That was the beginning of me thinking about translucency in the environment,” she said. “How weather relates to honesty, and all the political language around truth.”

Rather than illustrating ideas directly, Melinda allows concepts to remain embedded beneath the surface. Meaning accumulates slowly.

“My work really has to do with what I’m thinking about first,” she said. “Then the materials find their way.”

This winter marks a quieter chapter in that ongoing cycle. After a period of illness and recovery, she has returned to the studio gradually, allowing reflection to guide momentum.

“It’s a good time to hibernate,” she said. “To revisit what I’ve made and make room for another level of ideas, ideas reborn.”

Seasonality moves gently through her practice. Winter invites introspection; spring signals renewal.

“When spring comes,” she added, smiling, “I feel like I’m ready to move on.”

Yet one constant remains unchanged: the act of making itself.

“I always love being in my studio,” she said. “There’s never a season I don’t love it.”

Over the years, many of Melinda’s works have moved into private collections, restaurants, and public spaces: some now lost to closures, relocations, or disasters. 

“Once I’ve made it and documented it, it belongs somewhere else,” she said. “I’ve already had the conversation with it.”

The comparison she offered felt both tender and matter-of-fact: artworks, like grown children, eventually leave home.

“You want other people to look at it. If I did a good job, it can go somewhere.”

Watching her move through the studio, I began to understand that nothing in her practice is ever truly finished. Materials reappear years later. Ideas resurface in altered forms. Completed works become beginnings again.

Compost mode, after all, is not an ending, but rather, a transformation.

Melinda’s work reminds us that clarity rarely arrives all at once. It emerges gradually, filtered through layers of experience, memory, and attention. Her practice asks viewers to slow down, to sit with ambiguity, and to allow understanding to unfold over time.

Her work will be on view at Santa Monica Studios 3026 as part of Under One Roof, inviting audiences into that same process of looking slowly and seeing differently.

In Melinda’s practice, nothing is discarded. Everything becomes part of renewal: memory, material, and time alike.

For more information on Melinda and her work, visit her website: https://www.melindasmithaltshuler.com/

By Sam Spiegel

Leila Youssefi is an Iranian-American fine artist whose multidisciplinary practice explores cultural identity, environmental storytelling, and collective futures. Her work spans painting and public art, often rooted in research and community engagement.

When I sat down with Leila, I expected a conversation about the four paintings she is preparing for the Under One Roof gallery opening at Airport Studios 3026 on February 22. What I walked away with was a deeper understanding of Leila and the presence of duality, and its unyielding reflection, in her artwork.

Her presence mirrors her canvases: bold, immediate, and layered with meaning. Whether large or small, her work commands attention. It’s current and edgy, yet carries a depth that remains long after leaving her studio.

She is currently preparing four small paintings for Under One Roof. The unfinished works are modest in scale, but they carry the ghost of something larger. They began as informal studies: painting sketches made without any expectation of exhibition. Now, those early explorations have been identified as essential to the show by curator Peter Frank.

 “They came out of play and discovery,” Leila explained. “I’m continuing them with the same ethos, tuning in and seeing where they want me to take them.”

Progress, for Leila, is rarely linear. She described a familiar rhythm: long stretches of uncertainty followed by brief moments of clarity. Paintings that feel nearly complete can shift dramatically in their final days.

Seasonal shifts also influence her practice, even in Los Angeles, where winter is more symbolic than climatic. She pays attention to cultural rhythms -- the longer nights and quieter spaces that allow reflection. “It doesn’t feel like winter in California,” she said. “But cosmically, it’s winter. The nights are longer. There’s less noise. When there’s less noise, it’s easier to hear what’s trying to come through.”

This attentiveness informs recurring themes in her work: duality, integration, and wholeness. She doesn’t see duality as a problem to solve, but as a condition to inhabit. “A lot of my recent work is about duality,” she said. “And about integrating that duality.” For her, this is less a concept than a lived process: confronting shadow, finding light, and allowing both to coexist. Inner Union, Leila’s painting currently exhibited at the Torrance Art Museum, embodies this philosophy. “By seeing the Self soberly – as one might empty out the contents of their purse to examine, reorganize, and release – we transmute what would otherwise like to remain hidden. This act of integrating our dissonant parts returns us to unity,” she said.