She might then start some digital color studies, adjusting the entire image to a non-photographic blue, so she can print out the work, draw on it, and rescan a new draft. The non-photo blue technique comes from Koak’s comics background (she earned a master’s degree in media from CalArts) and allows for annotation using a light shade of blue that scanners and printers can be set to ignore.
“I’m not entirely convinced there’s a single state of completion. It’s usually more like a series of waves that culminate,” Coker said. “If the tension of striving for perfection is a kind of holding your breath, then it’s important to include a moment of loose exhalation—a shaky pattern, a drop of water. My initial instinct is to dismiss these things as laziness. For me, it’s important not to push things so far that they never go wrong, which is a therapy for an anxious brain that wants to control everything.”
This question of control is the subject of recent work to be exhibited at The Driver. Some jobs are downright threatening. One of the images features a female figure in the foreground, her hair brushed by a looming, dark, anonymous figure in the background. The tension in the hair, the discomfort in the eyes of the foreground figure. Vibrant ruby and sapphire tones. Whose hand is caressing the foreground figure?
Coker has a penchant – she’s even known for it – to treat the human body in playful ways. The limbs stretch, collide, and curl, all at the same time appearing huge and weightless. In her world, as in the above-mentioned painting, it is believable that the hand on the forearm is the foreground figure’s own, in an act of self-love, that it belongs to someone outside the frame, to us, to someone who fills the wide-eyed figure with distrust, unease, and pain, less as a person with agency than as an object to be caressed at will.
“In many ways, this is part of the same conversation of my earlier work. I’ve noticed that almost all of my exhibitions tend to focus, in both conscious and unconscious ways, on the idea of duality – and duality is often about the difference between ourselves and others,” Coker said. “But for the show, it’s more about melding that duality and seeing where those parts get messed up and we subtly feed off each other just to become more like ourselves.”
It’s often important to me to put together things that initially feel jarring or have a different tone. ““.
In another painting, a woman lies leisurely on the floor, a cigarette burning in an ashtray, and a cat watching her from a chair. Cats play an interesting role in her works: gargoyles as protectors, as sources of comfort and play. “Sometimes I think I mythologized them a little bit, turned them into dragons, or twisted them into some translation that felt like cats,” she said. They watch, interact, and play tricks.
In Coker’s work, cats are records of our daily lives, witnessed but not understood. They are a stone monument in the desert. What does a record just record? unknown. There is no knowledge in the world that can teach us how to read their minds. Our inability to read cats only makes it even less possible for us to read other characters, let alone ourselves.
Below the cat’s sight, next to the reclining figure, various pieces of paper were cut out next to a pair of scissors. She clasped her hands and looked out of place in the picture. Are your hands full of desire? Are they afraid? Is she staring into the past? In the future? Is it for people just walking in the door?
“I’ve been thinking a lot about the self,” Coker said, “or more specifically, the idea that the self is not the lonely singular thing that we idealize it to be. As a person, it often feels like a mixture of different identities. Often these identities are formed by internalizing aspects or aspects of the world around us. It’s a fictional character, a part of a friend or relative, a stand-in for a broader social character, a historical trope, or an archetypal reimagining. Essentially, we are these little feedback loops with the world around us, capturing the bits of life that fit us until we become who we are.”
While “Driver” is set to premiere in a few weeks, Cork has a number of other projects ready to take its place. For example, she’s learning how to flocculate acrylic in post-painting wastewater, which benefits the environment and rewards her with a pile of acrylic paint that can be dried and used in sculptures. Another project will span several galleries and center on the ideas of heat and nature, which will include new paintings as well as bronzes and furniture.
More immediately, she has a residency at Tamarind College in New Mexico and large-scale paintings in preparation for upcoming exhibitions in San Francisco and London. And, of course, her publishing project The Punishment Club.
“I think the most interesting projects for me are always the ones that pose puzzles,” Coker reflects. “I like to be challenged and I get very bored if I don’t learn something new, so areas where different mediums collide are often the areas of work that interest me the most.”*
