MONICA COOK
Milk Fruit
October 19 - November 23, 2013
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