Mel Rosen
NOTHING IS SAVED BY REMAINING THE SAME. AND SO THE ENDANGERED LEARN THE HARD TRUTH — NOT TO CLING TO THEIR FORMER SHAPES, BUT RISK MUTATION. SURVIVAL IS NOT PRESERVATION, BUT TRANSFORMATION. TO ENDURE, WE MUST EVOLVE, HYBRIDIZE, BECOME STRANGE ENOUGH TO LIVE AGAIN.
I’m drawn to what we can’t quite explain—the strange, mysterious, and unsettling. Technological velocity, mythology, and ecological unraveling have fueled my interest in our need to find meaning in the unknown. I think of my work as a kind of future archaeology: imagined relics from a changed world, untethered by time, carrying traces of the past.
Through drawing and ceramics, I imagine these relics as living forms responding to their surroundings. Like organisms, they register environmental pressure through growth, disintegration and adaptation, while AI-like distortions reflect the accelerating influence of technology. These distortions recombine with organic forms, mythic symbols, and fragments of antiquity, blurring the boundaries between artifact and creature, evolution and invention.
The material, spiritual and digital artifacts we create to survive are transformed by the forces that surround them. What endures reshapes our cultural memory. New relics emerge and unfamiliar worlds take shape, holding both warning and promise.
Rosen holds an MFA from Tyler School of Art/Temple University and a BFA from RISD, with additional study in Rome and New Zealand, exhibits nationally and internationally and lives in South Carolina.