Mel Cook is an emerging artist who lives and works in Bloomington, IL. She produced a series of seven monotypes at Manneken Press in March of 2013. In these prints, which are layered with printed imagery and collaged elements cut from printed and/or colored paper and fabric, the artist explores space within still life and its relationship to content.
She writes:
“I am interested in how Still Life and Portraiture can function in similar ways. The figure often becomes another object within the arrangement, while the other objects such as flowers become antagonistic. When excluding the figure from the Still Life there are still notions of the figure being present; rugs, frames, windows, and tables are all designed around the scale of the human body. The figure’s presence and absence is inherent in each work. This series of work questions ideas relating to traditional Still Life and Portraiture; the notions of framing and “pictureness” of the image, the “object-ness” of whatever is within the frame, and the perception of how these concepts are related to historical means of viewing”.
