Emma cc Cook & Em Kettner: Caterpillar
November 9th 2024 - January 18th 2025
Open Saturdays from 11am-5pm.
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.
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.
Funny Farm I, 2024
Oil, acrylic, walnut artist frame, upholstery
27 x 45.5 x 1.5 inches
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.
Em Kettner (b. 1988, Philadelphia, PA) is an artist and writer based in Richmond, CA. Her installations feature sculptures, tapestries, and drawings that detail the ingenuity of people with disabilities. Her miniature work in Caterpillar is about the ties that bind us — bloodlines, companionship, and ever more sprawling webs of connectivity.
Kettner's recent solo exhibitions include: Homebound at François Ghebaly Gallery (New York, NY), Sick Joke at Chapter NY (New York, NY), Slow Poke at François Ghebaly Gallery (Los Angeles, CA), Play the Fool at Goldfinch (Chicago, IL)
Her sculptures are currently on view in the exhibition, Tender Loving Care: Contemporary Art from the Collection at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, through July 2025.
Em's work has been reviewed and published in Cultured Magazine, ArtForum, Art in America, Sculpture Magazine, Contemporary Art Review LA (CARLA), HyperAllergic, Institutional Model, and Sixty Inches From Center. In September of 2023, Fulcrum Arts published her interactive digital storybook, "Doctor, Doctor," an illustrated fever dream journey through history, myth, and patient-hood.
Em earned her BFA from the University of the Arts in Philadelphia, and an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She is represented by François Ghebaly Gallery in Los Angeles and New York.
On behalf of Em, Outer Space will donate 5% of its profits from any sales of work to a non-profit of the artist's choosing.
Outer Space would like to thank Francois Ghebaly for their support in organizing this exhibition.
Em Kettner additionally would like to thank Ross Normandin for his invaluable help in the preparation of this exhibition.
The Resting Jester, 2024
cotton + silk woven around glazed
porcelain
6 x 5 x 3 inches
My miniature sculptures are about the ties that bind us — bloodlines, companionship, and ever more sprawling webs of connectivity.
The small scale is a twist on votive objects, which were historically offered to deities as pleas for relief from illness and disability. I love those animistic qualities and that kind of magical thinking. But rather than wish away certain physical conditions, I want to celebrate the ways our bodies transform and adapt to support one another. Many of the sculptures are interdependent at the material level: fragile porcelain limbs are held together by woven bindings, and in turn, the clay serves as the armature for its own protective cocoon.
This new series brings together a troupe of hoop-shaped hybrid beings: expectant parents, performers practicing routines, and figures melting into their memories. These composite characters intertwine in gestures that are sensual and assistive — many limbs making light work of lifting and loving. They wear the flamboyant costumes of jesters to insist that nothing is too sacred to be comical, or to be shared.