Most people know Melora Walters from the screen. She was Claudia in Magnolia, Jessie in Boogie Nights and the mom in PEN15 and that is where the name usually stops for people. Fewer know that she has been painting for years, that she studied at Pratt and that she has shown work in New York, Los Angeles and Berlin. Her new show is called Ancestral: the hour of the wolf and it is hanging right now at Studio DDLA on Chung King Road in Los Angeles. It opened on October 2 and it runs through November 6, with a Dia de los Muertos reception in the middle of that.
The hour of the wolf is an old phrase for the stretch between about three and five in the morning, the part of the night when people who cannot sleep lie awake and the part of the night when, according to the old saying, most people die and most people are born. That is the title. The paintings are women and animals, mostly wolves and coyotes and dogs, sharing the same patch of ground and sometimes the same body.
Studio DDLA On Chung King Road
The gallery is the part of this that makes it more than another actor-with-a-paintbrush show. Studio DDLA is at 944 Chung King Road, on the pedestrian strip in Chinatown that has been a gallery row for a couple of decades now. It is run by Jill Schock, who has worked as a death doula in Los Angeles for more than ten years. She has a master’s in divinity from Vanderbilt and trained as a clinical chaplain and she opened the studio in 2023 as a physical space for death work, which at the time made it one of the first of it’s kind in the country. People come there for end of life planning, for grief groups, for workshops on what to do with a body and with the paperwork and the gallery wall is part of how the space pays it’s rent and stays open.
So when Walters hangs paintings about ancestors and the dead hours of the night in that room, the room is already doing some of the work. You can see what Schock does with the space on her Instagram, @deathdoulala, where the show was first announced along with the reception dates.
The Paintings In The Show
Walters paints in a loose, scratched-in way. The figures are drawn fast and then worked over and a lot of the canvases have writing on them, sometimes a title and a date in the corner, sometimes a whole line of text running across the picture. The women in these paintings are not posed. They stand or crouch or lie down and the animals are next to them the way a dog is next to you in a kitchen, not symbolic so much as just there.
Coyote Shadow 13 is one of the smaller pieces, 18 by 24 inches and it is dated June 2024 on the canvas. The number in the title tells you there are at least twelve others in that series somewhere and this is the one she picked for this room. The coyote is the Los Angeles animal more than the wolf is and anyone who has lived on the east side has seen one trotting down the middle of the street at four in the morning, which is to say during the hour the show is named after.
The antlered figure is the one I kept coming back to. It is dated September 2024, untitled and the figure has antlers growing out of a human head and a dog sitting at it’s feet looking off to the side. It is not a monster painting. The figure looks calm and the dog looks bored and that is what makes it work, because the strange thing in the picture is treated as ordinary.
Another untitled piece has the words “I count the wind says shhh” scratched across it. There is no official title for that one, so that line is the name people will end up using for it. It reads like something said to a child who cannot sleep or something a person says to themselves at the hour the show is about.
The Two Large Panels
Two works in the show are much bigger than the rest. Both are 60 by 40 inches, both are from 2024 and both are built from two panels hung together. They are the pieces that hold the back wall.
The Ancestral Queen of the Night is the title piece in all but name. A woman takes up most of the height of the two panels and the dark around her is worked in layers rather than just left black. If you stand back from it in the gallery the figure reads first and if you walk up close the surface takes over and the figure almost disappears into the marks. It is the painting that gives the show it’s tone.
Etude No. 5 is the same size and the same two-panel build and the title is a music word, a study or a practice piece. Calling a painting this big an etude is a kind of joke about scale or maybe just a plain description of how she works, which is by doing the same figure over and over until one of them holds. This one held.
There is gold in a few of the paintings, used in thin passes over the figures rather than as a background and in the detail shots you can see how thin it is. It catches the gallery light at certain angles and goes flat at others, which is a cheap trick in theory and a good one in practice, because it means the paintings change as you move through the room.
Dates And Address
Studio DDLA is at 944 Chung King Road, Los Angeles, CA 90012, in Chinatown. The street is pedestrian only, so you park on Hill Street or Bernard Street or in one of the Chinatown lots and walk in. The gallery keeps irregular hours between events because it is a working death doula practice the rest of the time, so the three dates below are the sure ones and for anything in between it is worth messaging the studio first.
- Opening reception was Thursday, October 2, from 6 to 10 pm.
- Dia de los Muertos reception is Monday, November 2, starting at dusk.
- Closing reception is Friday, November 6, from 6 to 10 pm.
The November 2 date is the one to aim for if you can only make one. It is Dia de los Muertos, the gallery is run by someone whose whole job is sitting with the dead and the people they leave behind and the paintings are about ancestors. That is not a coincidence, that is the show being hung in the right room at the right time of year. The closing on November 6 is the last chance to see the work in person and after that there is no word yet on where the paintings go next.
I went in expecting an actor’s side project and left having spent longer in front of Etude No. 5 than I spend in front of most things. The paintings are rough and a few of the smaller ones feel like they belong in a sketchbook rather than on a wall, but the big two are the real thing and the room they are in is the right room. Go on the second of November if you can.