The works of Melora Kuhn are a constant observation of people’s experiences with themselves and with society. Kuhn makes use of the pictorial language of mythologies and history, in particular the pictorial forms of 19th-century American art history, from which she isolates individual pictures and places them in a new context. Her interest thereby is in details that are forgotten or elided in the narrative, in order to take a firmly established and well-known story in another direction and to inscribe a new readability into the personal biographies of the protagonists in her pictures. To do this, she uses the background to hint at the persons’ state of mind or a contour drawing above the portrait to add a second narration.