This artist monograph features the work of LA-based artist Emma cc Cook. The book weaves together select paintings and sculptures by Cook spanning from 2019–2025 along with free verse writings by the artist that invite us to step further into the worlds and narratives cultivating within Cook’s body of work.

Cook’s painted worlds are often accompanied by curious and often fuzzy storyboard-like vignettes and overlaid imagery that hover across the paintings. In response, the book’s margins and gutters are activated by their own overlaid images that converse with and offer playful glimpses into Cook’s themes, research, and trove of visual references that she has collected throughout 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. Within these vast depictions, acting as a visual archaeology of a nation steeped in expansionist drive, Cook pieces together certain defining myths of America.

London-based art gallery Public wrote of Cook’s work for her 2025 solo-exhibition, stating: “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.”