Christie Contemporary is pleased to present The Environmental Rorschach, an exhibition of new work by Naomi Cook, opening Friday, December 10 and continuing until January 22, 2022.
In a moment when the value of data seems to have surpassed the value of oil, Naomi Cook turned her attention to the intersection of these two economic drivers, namely global oil spill data. Translating statistical information into visual volumes is at the core of Cook’s practice, as she constantly mines tabulated records on a range of subjects for image potential. The oil spill data led to records of other ocean trauma, such as ghost nets and agglomerated plastic waste, realized as a suite of drawings, etchings and tapestries. Data is commonly considered a package of verified facts, but nonetheless requires interpretation to communicate value. This proposed a psychological paradigm that became the core of this project for Cook, as data began to operate as a kind of Rorschach test.
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I’ve spent my life to date developing survival skills that often seem like a process of decoding the world around me. My art practice is an expression of this process of decoding. All my artistic projects start with research and begin by looking at a large data set, with the intention of creating a visual interaction that goes beyond an aesthetic representation, and allows for poetry. My projects have included topics like High-Frequency Trading (the automation of the financial system), on-line dating apps (personal data), GPS coordinates, and, more recently, environmental statistics. With each project I’ve learned new ways to reveal the embedded patterns within systems. This has been a process of developing a language, which develops with each new topic and informs the previous works. — Naomi Cook