Emma cc Cook (b. 1989, Minneapolis, MN; lives and works in Los Angeles, CA) graduated with a BFA in painting from University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, MN, and studied at the Angel Academy in Florence, Italy. Select residencies include New York School of the Arts at Vytacil, NY and Campos de Gutierrez in Medellin, Colombia. Cook is a recipient of the MSAB grant, the Carter Prize in Painting and the Gay M. Grossman Memorial Scholarship.

Cook often combines dark paintings on canvas with abrupt insertions of walnut sticks, textural variations, and intriguing thematic ventures that are inspired by rural American West landscapes and the broad discourses surrounding identity, history, environment, and erasure. In Caterpillar, Cook emboldens her dark paintings with bulbous vibrant red color fields, highlighting the tension, violence, and beauty in this history.

Cook's recent solo exhibitions include:  Acre Eatersembed, Anonymous Gallery, New York (2024), Manners, Hayseed, 12.26, Texas (2024), Dibbler Stick with James Castle, Adams & Ollman, Oregon (2023), Pilgrim, Public Gallery, London (2022), Flags, Moskowitz Bayse, California (2022).

Recent group exhibitions include: Forthcoming, Sixi Museum, China (2024), To supplement the fragment, Public Gallery, London (2024), Nouveau Bozeaux, Bozomag, California (2024), Dreams and Reflections, Richard Heller, California (2024).

On behalf of Emma, Outer Space will donate 5% of its profits from any sales of her work to a non-profit of the artist's choosing.

view Emma's full biography

Outer Space would like to thank Et. al for their support in organizing this exhibition and additionally Amy Adams from Adams & Ollman for her invaluable help in the preparation of this exhibition.

The art is right here: the inner world of Outer Space

by Zachary Lewis

Originally published in The Hippo, January 2025.

Outer Space Arts in Concord will be showing the work of Emma cc Cook and Em Kettner in a show titled "Caterpillar" until Saturday, Jan. 18. The gallery is open on Saturdays from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m.

Roger Buttles opened Outer Space Arts in 2023 and has an MFA in painting and drawing from the Art Institute of Chicago. He has worked in the gallery world in San Francisco, Chicago and New York City.

"I just wanted something a little more intimate and quiet. People can sit and enjoy the work," Buttles said. He has his own art studio in a room across the hall from the gallery. The building itself was built in 1854 and was once the residence of Col. Benjamin Grover. Buttles likes to spark conversation with the art he chooses.

"I'm always pairing two artists together to create a dialogue between their work ... ," he said. "These two artists, they didn't know each other before, but they knew each other's work, and they both loved it. Emma's a Los Angeles-based artist. She does all the paintings. And then Em is a sculptor who's in San Francisco. I actually went to grad school with Em. That’s what feels good to me, the most exciting thing about the gallery is promoting work that I love. I've collected both of these artists. A lot of the work that I show are artists who I've either collected or really do want to collect. I never feel like I’m pushing things that I don’t fully believe in," he said.

The gallery is a labor of love that gained inspiration from a former teacher.

"The original idea of opening Outer Space is actually based on one of my mentors from grad school, Michelle Grabner. She was the chair of the painting department at the Art Institute in Chicago when I was there. She lived in the suburbs of Chicago with her husband and three kids, and she converted her tool shed and little garage into an exhibition space."

His mentor untangled an art knot for Buttles. "I'd never seen anything like that before, and it struck a chord with me. It's been really interesting that art can be presented anywhere, in any space. She became very known for her curating, and she ended up curating a Whitney Biennial based on what she was doing in her tool shed and that is so inspiring." The Whitney Biennial is an exhibition held at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York City.

But someone should not need to be in New York to experience art.

"I don't think that art and galleries should be an elitist exclusive thing," Buttles said. "It should be inclusionary. I love at the openings when people bring their kids and they're running around. I bring my daughters and my son, and ours are all young, obviously. I want them to be at the openings, because that's something I was never exposed to as a kid, I wasn’t exposed to any art, so I want that exposure and education for them," he said.

Many of the artists who exhibit at Outer Space show in those big city galleries as well.

“Em, she's in a show at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts right now. She has a similar sculpture as this one in the show ... There's like a gentleness and a specificity to her work that I love and you can see that in some of the ceramics on the wall. They're very specific scenes.”

As with most things in life, it is better in person, especially with Cook's work. Outer Space holds about four exhibits a year; the next one will be in February or March.

The red oval series marks a transition in Cook's painting — incrementally moving away from her monochromatic system, she introduces hovering graphic devices over the landscape. With latent pervasiveness, the round and oval forms halve the landscape into smaller and smaller parts denoting an interruption of the vanishing-point. These forms map framing systems into the vista of the monocultural farm, occluding her historic use of the narrative flotsam composed as vignettes. Reminiscent of Baldessari's dot painting, with his device of anonymity, Cook harkens to an amendment or indemnification of the original, acting as a thwarted investigation or a lingering specter, tethered like a balloon, caught over the horizon.