REVIEW: Asking New and Better Questions with Cheryl Pope

In “All There Is,” Cheryl Pope's new show at Monique Meloche, she engages with landscape through her new geomorphological "paintings." Review published in New City, Chicago.

https://art.newcity.com/2026/04/20/asking-new-and-better-questions-with-cheryl-pope/

Transcript

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This review of the work of Cheryl Pope from an exhibition entitled All There Is from a new show at the Monique Meloche Gallery in Chicago and first appeared in New City magazine with the headline Asking New and Better Questions with Cheryl Pope. Artist Cheryl Pope has built a highly unusual career around the act and politics of listening. Except that to call it a career is to do her a disservice by virtue of limitations. Referencing her work exclusively in those terms leaves us open to the accusation of having missed the point of not really listening ourselves. Pope's evolved and evolving responses are in many ways more the territory of activist sociology, creative radicalism, or, in her own words, poetic journalism. No such occupations exist, of course, but that's because careers are bulk carriers, not quiet, ill lit street corners of subtle, candid, yet necessarily imperfect engagement. Rather than a search for answers, in fact, Pope's practice leaves sense of an attempt to ask new and better questions. It's an opus which in her previous work has been engaged with a human form, with memory, with identity, and now in all there is at Monique Meloche Gallery with landscape. In her new geomorphological paintings, which for those unfamiliar with Pope's practice are actually made from needle punched wool roving on cashmere, there is no juxtaposition between physiological human form and landscape, and yet an essence of the sublime remains. On the face of it this is a break, a rupture, but to conclude that would be to reckon in binary, to assume that Pope has moved on from her interest in bodies, and decide that because a thing is a thing, it isn't another. Therein lies the politics of exclusion which Pope has so uniquely dismantled in the past. In general there is a preferential distance from which to view specific pieces of surface art, whereas in all there is this point becomes elastic. The observer might move but nothing displaces. In the face of the work the viewer becomes their own vanishing point. It's a matter of shifting interpretation of scale and focus, which also might be referred to as once again listening. It's in this flexibility of gaze that Pope encourages you to wonder what it is that you are looking at to the point at which you are invited to forget the need to classify at all. It's the deeply unifying vision of an expanded gaze in which anatomy becomes landscape and landscape anatomy, and both melt away to be replaced by an overwhelming feeling of awe. At its best, this is what beauty is capable of, of drawing together everything you ever knew and don't know and don't yet know into an instant of preposterous coherence. The literal through lines of Pope's work, which structurally support the landscapes, can be read as contours but could also be sound waves. Moreover, they might invoke how large objects or heavy landscapes shimmer space and time. This haze is especially poignant given two reference points of inception for the body of work. On the one hand, there is a personal history of the love shared by Pope's grandparents with all there is carved by her grandmother inside the wedding band for her grandfather, and on the other there is the AbbeQ region of North of New Mexico, a region where summers were spent by her father and grandmother, a sacred site of personal history to which Pope has been a pilgrim. As with the works themselves, it all feels so close and yet so far, far away, at once deeply rooted and yet unlatched. But whatever the actual position of the viewer or the artist, the tone of silent relief is unmistakable, a catharsis of sorts, the peace of having arrived.