Public Gallery is pleased to present Bucolic Cob, Emma cc Cook’s second solo exhibition with the gallery. Across eight heavily layered paintings of oil and acrylic on linen, Cook explores with systemic precision how accelerated capitalism and industrialization cast shadows across rural America. Her works serve as an archive, or perhaps a tombstone, blending speculative fiction with her Minnesota upbringing, to capture the no man’s land of the American mid-west — a hybridization of its mythical past and forgotten future — while advancing the contemporary genre of landscape painting.
Fields of textured oil paint fall into lines like troops in formation, serving as the building blocks for her expansive landscapes. In works such as Snidley Whiplash (2025), rows of floral motifs tug toward the horizon, a form of repetition that Cook describes as an exercise in tedium. Perhaps suggestive of the working masses, they simultaneously read like a chromosomal body mutated, alienated from its natural form. Her landscapes are otherwise bare if not for the pylon towers, a borrowed Greek term for gatekeeper, acting as lifeline, tether and witness to our increasing detachment from the physical world. Large geometric forms disrupt the terrain, coded in vibrant primary colors that play on systems of categorization, control and the technical language of color.
Through parted curtains and across traditional tablescapes, Cook interweaves vignettes of performed domestic life, satirical windows that caricature the working man and the ‘good American’. Lead cans and small jars, like those of a typical grocery display, are arranged across the gallery shelves; toeing the line between light humor and sheer mockery, the artist makes direct reference to the most commonplace toxic household detritus. As a counterbalance or bathetic shift to the dangers she presents, Cook infuses her compositions with the fantastical and otherworldly: in Dudley Do-right (2025), circular irrigation farms start to resemble crop circles, punctuated by oval specters that increasingly read like hovering UFOs. Cook describes the Minnesota sky as colored by mysterious lights and alien activity; in her compositions, stars turn to long streaks, moving at sci-fi level speeds in temporal tension with the otherwise quiet countryside.
Emma cc Cook (b. 1989, Minneapolis, MN, USA) lives and works in Los Angeles, CA, USA. Recent solo and two person exhibitions include Caterpillar, Outer space, Concord (2024); Acre Eaters, Anonymous Gallery, New York (2024); Manners, Hayseed, 1226, Dallas (2024); Dibbler stick, Adams & Ollman, Portland (2023); Pilgrim, Public Gallery, London (2022); Flags, Moskowitz Bayse, Los Angeles (2022); Peeping Tom, Et Al, San Francisco (2022); and Milkman Pigeon, Half Gallery, New York (2021). She has participated in group exhibitions at Sixi Museum, Nanjing; Et al, San Francisco; Almine Rech, Brussels; Harpers, New York; 1226, Los Angeles; Adams & Ollman, Los Angeles; and Public Gallery, London. Select residencies include New York School of the Arts at Vytacil and Campos de Gutierrez in Medellin, Colombia. Cook received the MSAB grant, the Carter Prize in Painting and the Gay M. Grossman Memorial Scholarship.
