Benjamin Cook, Polymodal Translation, Zg Gallery

Fanny Pack (blue): Template Painting Study Acrylic painting on paper, 2023, 20” x 27.5”ˆ

By: Grey Dey

There is more than warmly greets the eye at Benjamin Cook's playful current solo show at Zg Gallery in Chicago. The gallery is brimming with charming and inviting works, each with more than enough mystery to sustain one's interest and encourage further investigation. Subjects are abstracted or representational, or both at once. Like a children's museum or a pre-school classroom, there are soft, bright colors shaped into familiar symbols, soft wall sculptures, design templates, and diagrams. As one begins to read the descriptions, clues are revealed as to the artist's references and inspiration. Take "Make-Up Bag: Template Painting Study" for example. It's such an intriguing painting that I was already drawn in. But how is this painting a Make-Up bag? And what "Template" is the description referring to? 

Make-Up Bag: Template Painting Study, acrylic on paper, framed: 35" x 27.25"

Cook's practice has been centered around various conceptual projects that interrogate the relationships between digital and material modes of visual organization and representation, and the spaces between them. He dissects the dichotomy of the real world/digital world binary, and collapses the assumption that digital screen experiences are somehow not as real because they are "virtual." Let's take another look at the make-up bag, but this time as an object, as in "Make-Up Bag Product Render Drawing Study." An online image of what your personalized template of a custom manufactured make-up bag wrap will look like on your bag at home, is beautifully hand-rendered with colored pencils on mylar to purchase and hang on your wall. Cook is illustrating for us that our experience with each modality of the custom wrapped make-up bag is no less "real" than the other. 

Make-up Bag: Product Render Drawing Study, color pencil on Mylar, sheet: 12.5" x 20"

Each project examines how technology shapes us and shapes the changing definitions of art and aesthetic experience, disrupting the hierarchies of institutional categorizations such as "high" and "low" art, authenticity, and authorship. In addition, many of Cook's projects experiment with democratizing the how, when, and where of experiencing art, such as on someone's arm as a temporary tattoo, on an Instagram account art gallery, or as a personal upload onto a Wikipedia entry. Now, through this body of work, Cook's artwork is uploaded onto templates that, in turn, become digital example images of the final product that remain on the manufacturer's webpage indefinitely until they are taken down. Some of these will be accessible to the public as they browse examples. My mind immediately went to the possibilities of inserting subversive artwork and messages on this unknowing public art space! 

Windows 95: Product Render Drawing Study and Windows 95 Bean Bag Chair

Throughout Cook's career, loosely painted colored stripes that form arches or concentric ring shapes appear within the artist's projects. Alicia McCarthy's work with various colored stripes in woven grids comes to mind. McCarthy has been an interlocutor for Cook, as well as Kenneth Noland. Cook's chosen ideographs of arches and concentric circles of stripes offer a vocabulary of abstract symbols that stand in for the mental and digital processes of organizing visual experience. These vibrant and pleasing patterned shapes return in this exhibition as his personal aesthetic style, or "monograms," wrapping prefabricated commodities that exist first as a digital template, then as a virtual rendering, and finally as a physical commodity wrapping delivered to your door. But Cook doesn't stop with the constructive process. These cloth wrappings are then deconstructed by seam-ripping and flattening them back out. They are then stuffed, quilted, and mounted to be hung on a wall. All of the objects in this show reference and include the individual aesthetic experiences of each step of the process. 

Windows XP: Template Painting and Product Render Drawing Study and Windows NT 4.0 Template Painting and Product Render Drawing Study

And the camp value of the selected commodities, such as fanny packs, make-up bags, and bean bag chairs, brings a delightful levity to the scope of what the artist is presenting. Cook became visually fascinated with the conceptual value of the abstracted templates, digital example images of the finished products, and the materialized product itself, which arrives on time through a mapped space. He has queried the aesthetic experience of each phase of the product's realization through affectionate and skillfully rendered drawings in colored pencil on mylar, tactile acrylic paintings on paper with drippings, overlaps, and transparencies, and, for the first time, in this exhibition, as soft textile wall sculptures. The fanny packs and other humorous inclusions make the viewing just that much more entertaining. 

By observing this process of making and unmaking, and ultimately of transformation, in person at the gallery, and through conversations with the artist, the works began to point to topics of identity politics and contemporary culture making. The act of wrapping generic, prefabricated utilitarian commodities with personally designed aesthetics on a digitally adapted template highlights the extent to which our personal identities and cultural affiliations are prescribed through capitalist consumer processes and prefabricated commodity signifiers. 

If culture is recognized by shared signifiers of identity and culture that are traditionally made and preserved through the labor of culture makers, what is anyone even making anymore? In our capitalist consumer culture, we are ever increasingly distanced from the production of the commodities that we have been convinced that we need just to function in society. We are left to create our style, or make that luggage or make-up bag "mine" by shopping and selecting. We express our personality, lifestyle, and perhaps even culture with our choices of prefabricated commodities. With customized templates, we can individualize that style one step further, as seen in this painting of a fanny pack template: 

And what do our selections and personalized wrappings say about other assumed binaries, such as the gender binary? How do they enforce them? How do my personally designed wrappings signify my pronouns, my erotic preferences, or my politics? Or not? What assumptions do we make when we look at a piece of luggage wrapped in stars and unconventional, colored art on a pink background? What is allowed and not allowed by institutionalized binary categorizations of personal identity? How do these aesthetic binaries then come into play in moral decisions of right and wrong, and how we treat others? Is a fanny pack, or its' printed imagery, really a signifier of anything? What about a makeup bag? Let's look at this rendering of the digitally imaged luggage: 

I highly recommend visiting this super fun and captivating exhibition. And ask yourselves, while you are enjoying these objects, why do we take the things we or others wear or carry so seriously? As the works in the exhibition show us, we can put anything onto our possessions, our bodies, and in our private or shared spaces. Throwing an aesthetic style onto a fanny pack, as Cook did, doesn't necessarily mean anything. Perhaps your reading of the perceived signifiers are projections. In any case, creativity and the disruption of the virtual/real binary is the message of Polymodal Translations. Where we find new ways to explore, express, and display our creativity is as good as any other. 

Windows XP: Product Render Drawing Study Colored pencil on (2) mylar sheets, 2024, 48” 36”