Jeffrey Cook at Simonne Stern - Brief Article

Art in America, Dec, 2000 by Mark S. Price

Witnesses or victims, the broom figures encircled the gallery, standing alone or assembled in pairs and groups, each prominent wooden handle topped by a lumpen mass fashioned into a featureless shrunken head and gnarled upper torso. The figures alternately evoked thoughts of a forlorn souvenir spoon collection, ominously arrayed cudgels or human bodies melted onto their brooms, like incinerated death-camp workers or Hiroshima street cleaners vaporized by The Bomb in midsweep.

The sense of tragedy, however, was oddly counteracted by the sweet colors that had been dripped and scumbled to cover the figures from head to bristle. The palette was deliciously French Impressionist, though solemnized in spots with metallic hues and the look of charring that has hitherto characterized the surfaces of Jeffrey Cook's works. The unusual color had been prompted by affectionate thoughts of a recently deceased patron and dear friend, the Vanessa to whom the show was dedicated and for whom one unique, altar-shaped piece is named. Whether the festive color will persist beyond these 19 memorial works is anybody's guess. On this occasion, with all due respect for Cook's grief, the affective prompting provided by the exhibition's literature was more distracting than edifying.

Those familiar with Cook's work know that he incorporates the broom in his sculpture to evoke its historic place in African ceremony, voodoo practices and covert marriage rites devised by slaves in the South. Prompted by the cheerier surfaces, one is more likely now to think of Jim Dine's broom drawings and Jasper Johns's assemblage with a broom, though art-world citation, ironic or otherwise, has never figured in Cook's program. A native of New Orleans, he studied sculpture at Xavier University with Martin Payton and John Scott. Subsequently, Cook earned an MFA at the San Francisco Art Institute, danced professionally with the Black Ballet Jazz company in Los Angeles and then returned to New Orleans to be a visual artist. It is tempting to conjecture that his native city's early French heritage, the awareness of his ancestors' enslavement and his immersion in modern dance all had a hand in shaping these watchful, rhythmically positioned figures, whose painterly exuberance only thinly veils their sorrow.