{"id":31743,"date":"2016-02-01T00:47:01","date_gmt":"2016-02-01T06:47:01","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/?p=31743"},"modified":"2018-10-09T14:37:29","modified_gmt":"2018-10-09T20:37:29","slug":"something-for-everyone-tess-cook-grant-fuhst-and-larry-revoir-fill-the-house-at-finch-lane","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/something-for-everyone-tess-cook-grant-fuhst-and-larry-revoir-fill-the-house-at-finch-lane\/","title":{"rendered":"Something for Everyone: Tess Cook, Grant Fuhst and Larry Revoir Fill the House at Finch Lane"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"ItsAWideWorld1\"<\/a><\/p>\n

It may seem like there are as many possible artistic goals, and strategies for achieving them, as there are artists, but it\u2019s not really true. Just as the number of genres remains finite\u2014landscape, portrait, figure, still life, and so on\u2014and the variety of qualities, like abstraction, representation, or expression, while infinitely graduated, still ranges among a few fixed stars, so artistic strategies constitute a familiar set of options. One artist may employ visual contrasts, her works playing well-known techniques, styles, moods, or other measures off each other. Another may choose a single look and concentrate on making it as deep as he can. And a third may strive to invent a completely new visual strategy: in essence, a new visual language. This month, Finch Lane Gallery presents three artists, each of whom typifies one of these three options.<\/p>\n

Tess Cook first turned up a few years ago with a number of very small canvases, each just large enough to contain the setup and punch line of the sort of joke that is funny in a picture, but would be disturbing, or worse, in person. Her paradigm was a species of crab cake: an uncanny zoomorph in which a hermit crab, instead of wearing the discarded shell of another marine organism, was seen dressed in a delicious-looking pastry. Puns are a matter of taste, but Cook intensified the confrontation by linking the irresistibly inviting with a threat so ancient and deep-seated it seems to come from each viewer\u2019s own DNA. The punning verbal keys to these works paled into insignificance before the suggested possibility of biting into voluptuous frosting, expecting a rich mouthful of cake, and finding instead the overgrown insect-body of a crab. It was funny at a conceptual distance, but once visualized up close, it made a cerebral encounter that could not be unthought. That Cook brought preternatural skill to her representations of the denizens of both pastry case and sea floor made the tableau so real, the encounter so intense, that laughter became as much defensive as aggressive.<\/p>\n

Because of their small size and resulting focus, those early panels recalled the work of Wayne Thiebaud, the locally grown American master who limns simplified desserts and candies on plain, solid-colored backgrounds. In Food Fight<\/em>, though, Cook\u2019s new works have grown in size and ambition. On these medium-sized canvases, she\u2019s enlarged her creatures to show even more detail, and while a few, such as \u201cStrawberry or Cake Walk,\u201d in which a cupcake bearing six birthday candles is grafted to the working parts of a blue crab with orange claws, still dwell in one of Thiebaud\u2019s cool, creamy voids, Cook more often creates contrasting settings, filled with bravura painterly effects against which the realism of the foreground subjects pops out all the more.<\/p>\n

Take \u201cContainment,\u201d for example. Here an elegant baker\u2019s display bell on a white base contains a stack of two round macaroons, the trendy Venetian pastry that from now on will always resemble the shell of a slider, the popular pet store turtle whose striped head and legs here protrude from the pastry\u2019s ruffled pied. True to her painterly impulses, Cook has carefully cataloged the array of optical effects produced by the glass bell, as though to assert that she is an objective observer, her apparent disinterest marred only by the tongue planted so firmly in her cheek. Another set of optical effects can be found in \u201cSolitary Blues or Jelly,\u201d the transparency of the latter dessert permitting seeds to float within while contrasting with the frosted surface of yogurt-covered pretzels below.<\/p>\n

Cook\u2019s backgrounds also display a catalog, primarily the intersections of realistic underwater environments and the painterly gestures that often produce them. \u201cPower Struggle\u201d employs watercolor stains among its techniques, while \u201cNapoleon Melt Apart\u201d juggles photorealism, in part a shallow-focus effect, against droplets\u2014real and rendered\u2014on parallel brushstrokes. Here, for once, the pastry seems to have the upper hand, as though overwhelming the turtle that lies on its back below. In \u201cI Scream, You Scream, Then We Eat Ice Cream,\u201d paint ran down a blank canvas that was then up-ended to produce a rising effect analogous to smoke, bubbles, or floating seagrass.<\/p>\n

If one boundary Cook confronts in Food Fight<\/em> is complexity, with so much going on in \u201cCoup d\u2019etat\u201d and \u201cIt\u2019s a Wild World\u201d that clarity suffers, another limit may be how disturbing an image can be and still be enjoyable. In some canvases she documents the Darwinian struggle to eat or be eaten, so that in both \u201cCourage\u201d and \u201cCravings,\u201d the harmless, eagerly anticipated biting open of the bonbon coincides with the animal\u2019s disemboweling. But of course it\u2019s all just a figment of the imagination, and part of the way Tess Cook has found to pull and push an audience off-balance, which is something good art has always sought to do. Wherever she goes next, Tess Cook will be followed by an enthusiastic audience that shares her appetites, even if not yet sure where they lead.<\/p>\n