MONICA COOK
Milk Fruit

October 19 - November 23, 2013


Monica Cook, The Tiller2013, mixed media, 100 x 64 x 198 inches


Milk Fruit is Monica Cook's most complex and ambitious work to date. Offering a complete and intricately-realized cosmology of sacrifice and reciprocity embodied by a parade of delicate, soulful animals and their jerry-built chariots, Milk Fruit displays the lavish craft and extravagant imagination familiar to those who have followed Cook's work.

Like the crowned queen of the state fair, a voluptuous cow posed as an odalisque issues floods of life-sustaining milk. She is borne on a litter that is reminiscent of small-town harvest festival floats, her milk lubricating the wheels and nourishing the earth beneath her. Bulbous frogs and majestic goats lend their services as rickshaw-pullers. A resplendent monkey is pampered in the upholstered confines of a mobile space-salon, equipped with porcupine-quill brushes, a champagne fountain pumping milk, and all the accoutrements necessary to keep a lady cozy and protected during a journey into the far reaches of the solar system. An interstellar crop-duster sprays a glittering mist of milk.

The guiding image here is that of the milk itself. Milk is a mystical alchemical transaction, flesh transmuted into a rich and wholesome substance in the ultimate act of caretaking. Here, milk is a sacrificial rite, the selfless surrender of one's own most intimate resources to feed another. Milk Fruitis animated by the spirit of potlatch, presenting an ethical universe in which wealth is measured by how much one gives away.

In the fantastical landscape of Milk Fruit, all living beings exist to nurture. The beings that inhabit this place are giving of themselves, just as a fallen tree rots and nurses new saplings with its body. In this ecosystem, an exposed ribcage is not morbid, but intimate. A snout encrusted with buboes elicits tenderness, not repulsion. The visible workings of anatomy are revealed, and the revelation is celebratory, infinitely accepting. Cook created this world as a tribute to the wounded, the newborn and the dying, the scarred and disfigured.

It is a rare glimpse into the possibility of unconditional love.
- Sarah Lippek


This is Monica Cook s second exhibition at Postmasters. Her first show, in January 2012, was declared "Best of 2012" by Artinfo. As in that exhibition, the sculptures from Milk Fruit will become actors in Cook's forthcoming stop animation video.

Monica Cook, "Volley": Previously familiar to me for her large-scale hyperrealist paintings of female bodies, fruits, and octopi mashed together in neither exactly sexual, nor completely grotesque piles of flesh, Cook's January solo show at Postmasters launched the year with a bang that was never matched. Her eerie sculptures of primate- and canine-like creatures equipped with squeezable valves that made their silicone organs pulse under patchy hides of animal fur made for a kind of terrifying but also inexplicably endearing post-nature petting zoo. They also set the stage for the exhibition's most incredible beast: its titular stop-motion video, an exquisite and emotionally rich six-minute short in which the creepy creatures came to life in a dazzling cycle of death and rebirth played out in neon tones amidst swirling currents of oozing gels. Cook played on both science-fiction and nature documentary tropes, revealing her sculptures' intricate inner lives in the process.

- Daniel Kunitz, editor, Modern Painters

Monica Cook
The Crop Duster

2013
mixed media*
78 x 80 x 152 inches
Monica Cook
The Crop Duster (detail)

2013
mixed media*
78 x 80 x 152 inches
Monica Cook
The Crop Duster (detail)

2013
mixed media*
78 x 80 x 152 inches
Monica Cook
The Admiral

2013
mixed media*
60 x 30 x 30 inches
Monica Cook
The Goat Cart

2013
mixed media*
84 x x 66 x 194 inches
Monica Cook
The Goat Cart

2013
mixed media*
84 x x 66 x 194 inches
Monica Cook
The Goat Cart

2013
mixed media*
84 x x 66 x 194 inches
Monica Cook
Gomba and Rollo

2013
mixed media*
21 x 28 x 26 inches each
Monica Cook
Nest

2013
mixed media*
36 x 25 x 32 inches
Monica Cook
The Tiller

2013
mixed media*
100 x 64 x 198 inches
Monica Cook
The Tiller

2013
mixed media*
100 x 64 x 198 inches
Monica Cook
The Tiller (detail)

2013
mixed media*
100 x 64 x 198 inches
Monica Cook
Unice

2013
mixed media*
32 x 20 x 66 inches
Monica Cook
Dune Buggy

2013
mixed media* and single channel video, running time: 10 second loop
47 x 36 x 24 inches

*Mixed media for all sculptures:
Water Tanks, hair driers, hamster habitat, plexiglass domes, magnifying sheets, dish racks, fishing floats, Christmas balls, breathing apparatus, cb radio, gloves, tin can, oil barrel, springs, tide bottles, radio airplane controller, fireplace screen, peatree dishes, faux fire logs, seadoo coolant tanks, clock radio, tv radio, various lights, flash lights, plastic barrel, wood grain contact paper, roller skate stoppers, furniture tacks, mirrored headboard, clothes hamper cloth, blow horn, stepladder, various tubes, bicycles, shoe polisher, gold leaf, gold trim, cpr mannequin, water with white tempra, Christmas tree candle holder, sugar egg diorama, plastic popcorn strands, plastic fruit, beaded fruit, bath sponge, bells, horns, towel rack, linoleum, mop, silver teeth caps, drain, bath mat, feather quills, porcupine hair, starfish, gold disco ball glass, fish net, tiller wheels, keg pump, faux leather, trash can, windshield glass, fly swatters, Chinese lantern, ice skating uniforms, hair brush and comb, skate boards, china cabinet, grocery cart wire, plaster, paper clay, super sculpt, lumina clay, polyester resin, silicone, scrap fur, stockings, acrylic paint, glass balls, acrylic balls, fabric, plastic tubing, metallic gold tensil sticks, vintage glass human prosthetic eyeballs, porcelain teeth, pins, beads, hair rollers, bath sponges, bottle brushes, telephone cords, plastic grapes, dog chew toys, milk from magic milk bottles, magic milk juice bottles, baby nasal aspirators, beaded dress, beaded plastic fruit, ice skating uniforms, fingernail polish.