Melissa Cooke Benson: ‘Generations’ at Mount Mary University’s Marian Gallery

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Image courtesy Mount Mary University

“Bling Smile” by Melissa Cooke Benson

“Bling Smile” by Melissa Cooke Benson

Consider the media at your disposal as an artist for a moment: internets stuffed with content; supply chains full of pigments from halfway across the earth. A single 200 ml tube of Windsor and Newton Ultramarine Blue would have started wars in 1500, and I just bought one for the equivalent of 60 minutes of minimum wage 2024 labor. Beyond materials, think of the tools: plotters, printers, cutters and of course computers to fashion the material abundance. In 2024 one can have a photographic image woven into a customized blanket or rendered and printed as an actual object by mail. And, if you know the right people, you can even have someone in China faithfully replicate your paintings for you. We have access to unfathomable agency to make art in the 21st century … and yet art doesn’t seem to be getting better at any appreciable rate.

Why not?

This question arose in my mind as I ventured out to see Melissa Cook Benson’s exhibition “Generations” at the Marian Gallery at Mount Mary University, running through March 8. The answer was behind me as it turned out. A dense fog shrouded the campus as I rolled into the main complex of buildings where the gallery lives. It looked medieval in the dark with its colonnades and arched windows. When I finally entered the gallery and saw the title for the show on the wall: G-e-n-e-r-a-t-i-o-n-s, I felt a sense of expanded time that gave me a little chill. Benson’s work employs graphite exclusively toward spectacularly imagined and executed images of everyday moments and objects. Many of the compositions in the show suggest domestic life and motherhood. Though there is one work showing a child in a bath, Cook Benson’s work relies mostly on subtly and impression to evoke a building sense of domesticity and familial space.

Honest Domestic Reporting

Much of the familial activity is implied through ephemera of the sort that gathers in homes with young children: googly eyes, handmade Valentine’s greetings, jars filled with collected nature. Several of the compositions in the exhibition feel like the 21st century American equivalent of 17th century Dutch still lifes. MN Nice (Dream Bigger) for instance features a desk arrangement of caddies and drawers outfitted with scissors, pens, and home-offic-ey junk. It’s personalized with a to-do list, a photo of a dog, and a small poster that reads “DREAM BIGGER,” which is a little campy, especially considering the self-aware title; however, the granular detail reads ultimately as verité. The sense of honest domestic reporting builds with each wonderfully particular work on paper.

Book of Leaves depicts two children’s drawings of plants next to a skull-as-planter, on top of the eponymous text. Very memento mori, but in the least severe way. Rather, the work offers a story about a mother and her child artists through objects and productive output. It’s somehow sentimental without being sentimental … or maybe it’s totally sentimental, and “fuck you, I’ll feel however I want.”

Despite their curious and evocative subject matter, Cook Benson’s works are also engaging as material delicacies. They seduce us with a Chuck Close-like level of detail but possess us with the presence of their surfaces. Each sheet is as satiny as untraversed two-day-old snow, with busy graphite marks mingled with jabby erasures, all braided together into velvety perfection. Like the skin of a child and the greasy-slick metallic brilliance of raw graphite itself. The subject matter, the surfaces, and the source material are in perfect alignment in Melissa Cook Benson’s work; each simultaneously telling their own story about time and connection. Graphite was one of the original pigments used by paleolithic cave painters; carbon-based, like us, and organic like culture shaping and being shaped across 10,000 generations.

Try to 3-D print that.

Event Listings: January 28– February 3, 2024

Milwaukee Art Museum

• Drop-In Art Making: Kohl’s Art Studio
• Sunday, January 28, 10 a.m.–4 p.m.

Milwaukee Art Museum

• Drop-In Tours: Architecture and Collection Highlights
• Sunday, January 28, 2–3 p.m.

Milwaukee Art Museum

• Season Preview Lunch
• Monday, January 29, 12–2 p.m.

Villa Terrace Decorative Arts Museum

• Work from Home Wednesday: coworking session at the Villa
• Wednesday, January 31, 12–3 p.m.

Racine Art Museum

• First Fridays
• Friday, February 2, 10 a.m.–4 p.m.

INOVA (1925 E. Kenilworth St.)

• Reception: Fiber/Form 2024
• Friday, February 2 from 5-7 p.m.

Gallery 2622

• Opening Reception: “The Planets”
• Friday, February 2, 6–9 p.m.

VAR Gallery, Second Street

• Opening Reception: “Abundance: The Lens of Black Women”
• Friday, February 2, from 6–9 p.m.

Milwaukee Art Museum

• Drop-In Art Making: Kohl’s Art Studio
• Saturday, February 3, 10 a.m.–4 p.m.

Milwaukee Art Museum

• Story Time in the Galleries
• Saturday, February 3, 10:30–11 a.m.

Museum of Wisconsin Art (MOWA)

• Wisconsin Biennial Opening Party and Awards Ceremony
• Saturday, February 3, 2–4 p.m.

Milwaukee Art Museum

• Drop-In Tour: Art by Artists of the African Diaspora
• Saturday, February 3, 2–3 p.m.

Museum of Wisconsin Art (MOWA)

• Amy Cropper Opening Party and Awards Ceremony
• Saturday, February 3, 2–4 p.m.

Saint Kate, the Arts Hotel

• AIR Time, Art & Studio Tour with AIR Anwar Floyd-Pruitt
• Saturday, January 27, 6:30 p.m.