On the Cover: Meg Coss

A woman stands on the edge of a balcony overlooking the city. Blocky brick buildings squat underneath golden spires with great clocks; cobblestones wobble the edges of distinct lines, ivory grows up the alleyway, and the few distinctly new, sleek metal buildings catch the last rays of light like a gold tooth in an old smile. As the sun sinks low, the myriad of shapes constituting the horizon’s silhouette begin to lose their defining characteristics, transforming into a collage separated only by densities of light. Meg Coss sighs and, turning her back to the night, re-enters her apartment. She confronts a living room floor full of colors, newspaper clippings, fonts and expressions – her collection as vast as the city itself.

Coss, also a previous editor for Motif, has always considered herself an artist. She says, “I feel like it has always been in there, I’ve always enjoyed the process of creating. It’s cathartic, a way to process emotions and make sense of the world.” She prefers working with tangible materials, stating, “The last thing I want to do is be on a computer. I like the process of gathering materials and organizing them in ways that are attractive and interesting to me, then stepping back and seeing what I created.” A disparate perspective in a field that is constantly competing with a digital world.

The proper terminology for Coss’s work is mixed medium, but she has a focus on visual art and collage. She enjoys its malleability, its capacity to often take on a life of its own. “I gravitate toward certain colors or images, toward something singular that will expand. It asks you for things, you’ll realize it needs something and you’ll add it until it just kind of grows.”

For this particular cover, Coss and Gina Lerman, Motif’s former graphic designer, came up with the idea to create a collage made from old cover art. With the idea in motion, Coss gathered as many old magazines as she could from the archives, trying to incorporate a little from each year. Something began to happen as she was going through the piles, saying, “as I was creating I was feeling this weird pride. You’re seeing all this cool stuff from people who lived here throughout the years. When I first moved here I saw ‘Creative Capital’ and sort of laughed, but making this collage was a way to make sense of it. There is a shitton of creativity here; the more you learn about it the more you see it.”

The art scene is something intrinsic to Providence, and Coss believes that “Motif has a duty to protect it, but we all do.” She does not want to entertain the idea of a world without art, and in order to preserve that space we must value our artists and our communities. She urges, “we need to provide them with not just opportunities to express themselves, but places for them to live and make art. When cities become unaffordable it begins fracturing those communities that are so essential to artists.” Although, like fabulously-dressed cockroaches, us artists are used to starving, living in squalor, and receiving little or no paycheck. Unfortunately it’s hard to get rid of us, but Coss makes a good point, “that doesn’t mean it shouldn’t be easier to live.”

Since this is the 20th anniversary issue, there is an undertone of nostalgia throughout the art and writing of the magazine. A feeling that is normally associated with shades of sadness, nostalgia is a wistful longing for the past. Coss would rather look back and feel comforted, opting to remember things that were particularly inspiring or fun. Art, she believes, is a reflection of subjective experience or memory: “It is not uncommon for me to see a piece of artwork and have a surge of emotion, sometimes I’m so overwhelmed that I cry, which sounds super weird. But when I see something powerful it really moves me.” When Coss creates a collage, she is not just stitching together things with aesthetic prowess, but gathering a map of images that stick, and adhere to, the mysterious qualities that our lives are made of.