Heaven Gallery is pleased to present Of Faith or Fetish, a solo show by Mel Cook. 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 a pre-knowledge expresses itself in the fear of anything irrational, illogical – or one might say: intuitive. One of the most striking examples of the collective trepidation of intuition (if it is thought to be a mutually exclusive logic) is the anxiety around the trope of the witch.

The witch represents a metaphysical knowing and is hybridity itself. The (his)tory of the witch is the story of the persecution of a hybrid experience, an assemblage of tropes, archetypes, and stereotypes. An ever-shifting icon of total relatability (she can be anyone anywhere). She is the temptress, the hag, a landowner, a healer, queer, of another religion or none, and ultimately kin, as sister, mother, or grand/(m)/other.

Queering the space between intuition and logic, painting is the embodiment of being and knowing. Intuition is logic bound within the body and of the body—the body always knows—an animal instinct that lives between language and action.

Channeling guides mark making; the act of writing and drawing becomes blurred. It is an intuitive act of manifesting, conjuring, and summoning. The written mark becomes a structure, giving way to a new language, or rather—something beyond language—a hybrid experience. The witch is coaxed from the surface and emerges from “nothing-ness,” borne and formed into poetic space always present; a pawn, an/other, and the mirror of the self.

Cook’s paintings are (self) possessed; a polyvocal cacophony of roaring, screaming, hissing, cooing, laughing and whispering—echoing stories from beyond.

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Tags: Chicago, Heaven Gallery, Mel Cook, Of Faith or Fetish, West Town