Join us for Of Faith or Fetish Artist Talk!

Playing with language, form, and figure, Mel Cook’s paintings challenge and complicate the precariousness of occupying otherness. They conjure themes of violence towards m/othering, queerness, spirituality, and the persecution of the witch. Drawing attention to these “invisible” systems at play, her body of work functions like a constellation; each painting functions as an anchor in an ever-expanding map of structural violence, historical and ever-present, in which the viewer must orient oneself.

Wandering in from the outside, the stranger is among us, unstable; Georg Simmel reminds us that they possess secrets and are needed to keep the collective social space functioning. Through the dichotomy of otherness, they mirror the fears of the collective self.

Cook’s paintings reflect an uncanny, metaphysical knowing…The foreshadowing of something that is felt but not yet known. The social paranoia towards anything that is seemingly gifted with such…