MONICA COOK | “LIQUID VESSELS”
"Liquid Vessels" by artist Monica Cook includes recent sculpture and painting, which further the artist’s investigations into material assemblage, found objects and adornment. Central to the exhibition are Cook’s complex sculptures. These intricate objects appear simultaneously native and alien, as the artist references the natural world through components that appear biological, while transforming recognizable elements into unfamiliar forms through a conglomeration of material. These striking forms, in pale earth tones and pastels, contain an intrinsic fragility, as if decaying.
The exhibition takes its name from Cook’s conceptual underpinning for the works. Her recent artwork makes reference to the vessel in many ways. As a functional object, the vessel holds and protects, much like Cook’s sculptures of bodies and carriers, which reveal their innards through translucent material, especially in her recent explorations in glass. Like objects of unknown use, the sculptures appear to have been plucked from a past alien civilization. Viewers are presented with a strange landscape, challenging expectations of the familiar.
A voracious appetite for collecting material formed the foundation of Cook’s handmade works. The artist employs mass-produced and biological objects as her medium. Materials as disparate as corncobs, sea urchin spines, traffic cones and artificial plants are fodder for her manipulation of form. Though the artist employs an abundance of media, the most recent works incorporate glass. Cook’s explorations with the manipulation of glass have opened her practice to celebrate and elevate the function of the medium as a transparent material that concurrently holds and reveals. As seen in "Seven of Fronds," an opulent, intricate form of many components, her work with glass is a celebration of the malleability, delicacy and strength of this material.
February 14 - May 19, 2019 | SCAD Museum of Art, Savannah, GA | text & curating by Ben Tollefson | photos by Aman Shakya, courtesy of SCAD
