It’s a revelatory moment when attachments once so strong in our minds, those both good and bad, release their tight grip on us offering new directions and opportunities. Possessing knowledge of the impermanence of everything in life is overwhelming but also freeing. For some, this tug-of-war is letting go of personal relationships and histories rather forgotten, but for artists this battle is often fought with their own work. Our pasts may take jabs at us; it is an intrinsic part of life, but as we let go of its power over us anything is possible.
Kissing the Scarecrow is Casey Cook’s first solo exhibition in New York City in more than a decade. In that time, Cook experienced heartbreak, became a musician and started a punk band, moved home to Chapel Hill, NC to assist her parents and build a life outside the hustle of New York, and reinvented herself as an artist. Her new paintings drift towards abstraction, but there is always an omnipresent figure still looming. Fiery, nebulous forms float on water-hued backdrops, and floral appendages emerge from a smoky haze creating narratives that are difficult to pin down. We see wide-open eyes constructed out of simple architectural shapes and mouths full of teeth that have become an entire head, or maybe we see none of this. The images we create are our own, and the artist retains the most intimate knowledge of each work for herself.
Cook’s new body of work shares affinity with artists such as Carroll Dunham, Elizabeth Murray and Susan Te Kahurangi King, but her paintings feel distinctly her own. They are incredibly raw and emotionally ablaze, and the works embrace an approach to image-making that feels more in line with drawing than painting. Subconscious riffs unfold illuminating human desire, love and loss, the present vs. the past and simply finding your own way. Dominated by melting forms, happy clouds and floating ghost-like shapes with hard-edged fangs, her diffuse figures play and joust with one another and seem to shout, “Don’t fuck with me, I love you!”.
The universal aspect of knowing we must all metaphorically shed our skin at different points in life builds empathy and character, and these moments can inspire the deepest expressions of art when the door is left open. Casey Cook has stepped into a new realm as an artist and presents us with images full of passion, longing and confidence.
Casey Cook (b.1971, Bellefonte, PA) lives and works in Chapel Hill, North Carolina and received her BFA from Otis College of Art and Design in Los Angeles and an MFA from The University of California Los Angeles. Cook has been exhibiting professionally since 1995.
