Mel Rosen
Mel Rosen is a multimedia artist whose practice examines the entanglements of nature, mythology and human interference. Influenced by art history, archaeology, marine environments, cellular structures, technology and climate change concerns, she merges personal, historical and mythic narratives through tactile surfaces and layered motifs untethered to chronology.
She considers how erosion, decay, and regeneration mirror environmental cycles amid the pressures of human and planetary change. Rosen’s 2D and 3D forms may sprout appendages, parasitic growths, or embedded relics—shelved, laced, glommed, marred, or adorned—suggesting parasitism, mutualism, mutation, evolution or decay. Surfaces are often encrusted, sunken, or raised, echoing natural accretion and human intervention. These forms question what is preserved and what is lost across time.
Intrigued by the latest technology, she has peeked into the face of our shared consciousness through AI. Rosen approaches AI not as a replacement for the hand, but as an extension of the collective visual language we all inherit and shape. Used as a lens into technological imperfections and as a mood board of mutations — once generated, these images cannot be fully unseen; aspects seep into her evolving visual vocabulary. With her drawings, she looks at AI with a critical eye, mimicking its algorithmic distortions to underscore how mutation operates across both consciousness and material form.
Rosen holds an MFA from Tyler School of Art at Temple University and a BFA from Rhode Island School of Design, with additional study at Temple Rome and the University of Canterbury in New Zealand. She has exhibited nationally and internationally and currently lives and works in South Carolina where she continues to explore how myth and material endure, evolve, or vanish in an ever-shifting world.
Rosen’s statement on AI: While it opens new creative possibilities and fast iteration, AI also raises questions around authorship, labor, and originality. I see AI as a powerful, inevitable addition to the artist’s toolbox and I use no images, styles or prompts sourced from other artists wherever I have control.
Though touched by AI and echo digital distortion, my work insists on the presence of my personal invention and my own hand, aspiring to make meaning through personal creativity, slowness and repetition in an age of artifice and replication.