PRESS RELEASE FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE 

Through; November 28, 2009

Start Date: October 22, 2009

October 22 – November 28, 2009

Opening Reception: Thursday, October 22, 7:00 p.m. - 9:00 p.m.

Monica Cook; Seeded and Soiled - Solo Exhibition at Marcia Wood Gallery

Monica Cook returns for her second exhibition at Marcia Wood Gallery with a new body of paintings and drawings. Well known for her arresting and beautifully rendered images of women in unsettling, surreal and challenging poses, Cook is populating the new works with a range of fascinating additional figures in quirky and subversive tableaux.

Marcia Wood Gallery 263 Walker St SW Atlanta GA 30313 http://www.marciawoodgallery.com
Contact; Marcia Wood 404-827-0030 marciawood@marciawoodgallery.com
High Res Images; please call 404-827-0030
Free and open to the public

MONICA COOK Seeded and Soiled

Monica Cook paints beautiful and disturbing portraits of women. Her figures are brilliantly painted, with breathtaking skill; Cook excels in rendering the subtleties of the flesh and details of light, tone and surface.  Painted with an eerie intensity, Cook's figures compel the viewer to study them, often surreptitiously, as there is a strong sense of invading an extremely private moment. We look, albeit sideways, with fascination at the beauty, humanity and complexity of these portraits. The recent work includes drawings in ink on mylar as well as the canvas oil paintings. Additional figures, male and female, have been introduced into the imagery of previously single female figures in a neutral field, resulting in intensely mysterious, rich and tantalizing tableaux.

In Seeded and Soiled, Cook’s nude women continue to be engaged with gorgeously rendered erotic food in scenes that elicit a range of emotion in the viewer from mesmerized hilarity to horror. The atmosphere in the current paintings however, has been altered from that of the prior works. The sense of pensive isolation of the previous solitary nude figures has been fractured and energized, as multiple figures, both clothed and nude are now interacting with each other, as well as with the food that they are consuming and playing with in sensual abandon. What is more, it is not solely the fact that some of the figures are clothed while others are nude that expand the implications of these utterly curious images, but the oddity of the garment itself - a captivatingly incongruous uniform vaguely reminiscent of an earlier era – and the fact that every clothed figure is wearing exactly the same uniform. To add to the surreality of the situation, all the women appear to be the same person, nude or clothed, tortured or enraptured, emaciated or corpulent. The artist has dubbed these nude and clothed women the “Nakeds” and the “Officials”.  Whether locked in battle as in the exquisitely precise drawings, or enjoying a sort of truce while sporting side by side in slippery, shining food as in the paintings, the Officials and the Nakeds play out the eternal paradox of existence as they, in the artists’ words “wrestle with debauchery and virtue, control and liberation, logic and absurdity – the beauty and repulsion inherent in each of these extremes and the magnificent struggle in our search for balance”.

Cook begins her work with photo-documented performances captured in a series of photographs or video.  Although her compositions are painted from source images of herself, and occasionally, friends chosen as models, Cook states that she rarely considers the finished work to be a "portrait" of herself or her model.  Her interest lies in capturing a sense of the physicality of flesh - in the light reflecting from skin, or the colors trapped in shadows off the folds of the body - and in the psychological space that is created in the process of composing the work. Cook allows the true subject of the painting to develop as she works; she enjoys, as she says, both the freedom and surprise that comes from allowing "the character to evolve on its own and not become trapped by expectations or likeness." The artist states: "I am often carried away with the details, using the paint to describe a near-cruel, sometimes disturbing, objectivity of the figure, heightening various textures on the body, the translucency of the skin, how the veins surface and recede, the subtle sheen of the lips and slickness of the eyes.  I love to paint flesh, fascinated by how history is trapped in the skin: the stories told in lines etched into faces, bruises and scars from their past.  I find myself heightening the details on and in the flesh, which enhances the mortal presence of the sitter and creates a tension between the psychological complexity of the person and their raw humanness."

Marcia Wood Gallery is pleased to announce the second exhibition at this gallery of paintings and drawings by Monica Cook in a solo exhibition titled Seeded and Soiled. The Georgia-born artist graduated Summa Cum Laude from the Savannah College of Art and Design in 1996 and now lives and works in New York, where she recently concluded a residency at the School of Visual Arts.  Since 1992, Cook has exhibited in museums and galleries throughout the US and Canada, as well as in the Netherlands, Israel, France and Switzerland.  Publications include Art in America, Le Figaro, Elle Magazine, and New American Paintings. She has also exhibited at art fairs with Marcia Wood Gallery in London, Miami and New York.

Marcia Wood Gallery, 263 Walker St. SW, Atlanta, GA 30313
Contact: Marcia Wood 404-827-0030 marciawood@marciawoodgallery.com http://www.marciawoodgallery.comFree and opento the public
Images: Please call 404-827-0030 for high resolution images.