This artist monograph features the work of LA-based artist Emma cc Cook, weaving together select paintings and sculptures by Cook over six years (2019 to 2025) along with free verse writings by the artist. The work invite us to step further into the narratives cultivated by Cook’s body of work.

Cook’s painted works are often accompanied by curious and often fuzzy storyboard-like vignettes; overlaid imagery hovers across paintings. In response, the book’s margins and gutters are activated by overlaid images that converse with and offer insight into Cook’s themes, research, and the trove of visual references that she has collected over the years.

Featured prominently within Cook’s works are the unmistakable depictions of the landscapes and signifiers of a past era of the American agricultural Midwest. Cook pieces together a defining visual myth of American, depicting the visual archaeology of a nation driven by the pursuit of expansion.

“Cook explores with systemic precision how accelerated capitalism and industrialization cast shadows across rural America. Her works serve as an archive, or perhaps a tombstone, blending speculative fiction with her Minnesota upbringing, to capture the no man’s land of the American mid-west—a hybridization of its mythical past and forgotten future—while advancing the contemporary genre of landscape painting.” —Public, 2025

Edited and designed by Ryan Gerald Nelson

Published by Era Editions, 2026

Softcover with dust jacket, 96 pages, full color offset, 7.87 × 10.23 in.

ISBN: 979-8-99-929521-7