Spring 2015 Diane Marek Series Visiting Artist Monica Cook mixes conventional and unusual materials in her sculptures, which she then brings to life in stop motion animated narratives.
In an exhibition running from February 03 – March 19, the Cress Gallery in the Fine Arts Center will feature the full stop motion animation “Volley” from Cook’s last completed project; the sculptures for “Milk Fruit”; and from the in-progress 2015 stop motion animation “Milk Fruit” are color stills. This exhibition and all Diane Marek Series events are open to the public. Admission is free.
“Monica Cook’s multi-disciplinary, experimental approach to process and materials, is very much on the leading edge of contemporary art,” said Ruth Grover, Director and Curator, Cress Gallery and Collections. “As with previous artists of the UTC Diane Marek Series, she is a risk-taker, an explorer, and an innovator. By bringing this artist and her work to Chattanooga, the campus and community have an opportunity for exposure to art being done now, and the current conceptual trends and ideas reflecting who we are as a society, as art serves all disciplines as a generator of thought and perspective.”
Cook employs materials common to a sculptor’s studio such as wire armatures, plaster, paper clay, polyester resin, silicone, and various other traditional sculpting materials. These are augmented with craft store goods such as acrylic paint, beads, glass balls, fabric, and fur.
Yet to fully express her imagined characters and narratives, large quantities of common and not-so-common objects are discovered on the streets, in junk shops, and on internet sites. Cook has used bags of life-like vintage glass prosthetic eyeballs and porcelain and metal teeth, a case of plastic fly swatters that became the wings and tails of birds, and dozens of identical chrome hair dryers which provided the propulsion system for a sculptural vehicle that resembles a spaceship or lunar rover.
Cook’s conjuring begins with her careful and attentive construction of life-scale human-like and animal characters, imbuing them with anatomical detail, exquisite jeweled surfaces and striking imperfections, costume, and attributes of persona. Then in constructing a world which they can inhabit, of carriages and carts for their travel, odd and familiar devices for communication, fruit bearing plants and fountains of milk for their sustenance, these creatures begin to find purpose in the larger scheme of Cook’s developing screenplay. The final step is giving them life through motion in the laborious process of stop frame photography that captures minute changes in position of eye and mouth and limb. When these frames are edited and compiled, and played at speed, the sculptural “actors” express themselves without dialogue through gesture and facial features.
The anatomical details and biological processes of Cook’s creatures create an unsettling tension, yet their tenderness and motivations of care and protection allow our full identification with them. Theirs’ is a realm somewhere between Aesop’s Fables, Planet of the Apes, and Space Odyssey, a combination of future, past, and present; but their story is truly and magically ours. While these “actor sculptures” take the form of animals and humanoids that are not quite human, their humanity is universal. Conceptually woven around themes of nurturance and healing, procreation and life, decay and regeneration, Cook’s work alludes to a magnificent cycle, not just of life as we might know it, but of the primal mystery and mythic sense of an enduring consciousness of being.
A native of Dalton, Georgia, Cook recalls that during her junior and senior year in high school in Dalton, she would regularly drive to Chattanooga to participate in the Tuesday night life drawing community cooperative, a long tradition that still meets in the Department of Art at UTC, and she notes the importance of that opportunity to the progress of her career.
Her work has appeared in many group exhibitions nationwide and in Germany, Denmark, Croatia, and Canada. Monica Cook lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. In addition to her studio practice, she teaches at the New York Academy of Art in New York City.
Visitors are welcome at the Cress Gallery of Art Monday through Friday, 9:30 a.m. – 7:30 p.m. Monday – Friday and Saturday and Sunday from 1– 4 p.m.
The Cress Gallery of Art is located in the Fine Arts Center, 752 Vine Street, 37403, corner of Vine & Palmetto Streets, on the campus of the University of Tennessee Chattanooga.
