Mel Cook and Angela Inez Baldus / Between the Void | Memorial

March 22 - April 23, 2014

Opening Reception (FREE to public):
Saturday,March 22, 2014
6:00 to 8:00 pm

Light Snack and Beverages Served

Mel Cook “Between The Void” Cook paints still lifes and portraits, two genres that are usually looked down upon as less-than-serious genres. They’re both genres that focus on ‘objects’ – flowers, dishes, fabrics, interiors, faces, poses, etc., rather than stories or emotions. Cook’s paintings showcase these traditional items, but she paints them in a way that intentionally complicates our ability to look at them as such. Non-painting materials, such as rope, stickers, and wrapping paper serve to break the illusion of ‘painted objects’ while heavy textures and thick brushstrokes make the viewer keenly aware of the inherent falseness of illusionistic representation. Cook says that her paintings are ‘sarcastic, yet sincere’. She gives us painted objects to look at, but then makes us self-aware of our desire to look at them. The paintings themselves seem to resist our gaze, creating a dialogue between viewer/viewed that’s not necessarily friendly. Angela Inez Baldus “Memorial” Inez Baldus tells stories in her paintings, but they’re not her stories, nor are they supposed to be ours. She says that her paintings serve as memorials - memorials for events that happened to other people. She’s not simply acting as a ‘hired gun’; crafting memorials that don’t hold meaning to her. The act of painting these memorials, according to Inez Baldus, are a way for her to process her own emotional state and explore temporal states of being – time, death, repetition, rebirth, etc. The memorials are designed to evoke nostalgia via the imagery that Baldus has painted, but also via the past experiences and expectations that the viewer has brought with them.