Interviews From Yale Radio / Artists, Curators And More

New York-based artist Ethan Cook engages with materialism and minimalism through his two primary media, woven canvas and handmade paper. Cook’s paintings are composed of colored fabric panels that have been hand woven on a four-harness loom, stitched together, and stretched on bars. Foregoing the notion that in order to paint one must apply pigment to canvas in some way – be it by brush, by knife, or by hand – Cook instead uses a loom to weave large swaths of colored fabric that make up his surfaces. For Cook, the performance of artmaking is at once meditative and intensely rhythmic. The grandness of the loom, with its thousands of moving processes and parts, generates a symphony of action that is both quick and unpredictable, developing a variety of idiosyncrasies like a pulled thread or skipped knot, producing a variety of textures that reveal that the works are indeed, handmade. Cook has had solo exhibitions at Nino Mier Gallery, Los Angeles, Brussels, Marfa and New York; Megan Mulrooney Gallery, Los Angel