Sam Cooke
Do You Like Me

September 9 – October 9, 2016
Opening Reception September 9, 6-9pm

At the risk of reading like a self-help book, I’d like to present three instances of advice, two for you and one for myself. This can be played as the game Two Truths and a Lie, as I will not be saying which are self(you)-help and which is self(me)-help.

1. There once was a man who became convinced his neighbor, two doors down, was watching him through a two-way mirror in his medicine cabinet. He went through drastic measures to evict the spying neighbor, which backfired, and resulted in his own eviction. Had his literal, or figurative, medicine cabinet been full of literal, or figurative, medicine, this would not have been an issue.

2. Mannequins in department stores are produced to stand idly. This is not an accurate representation of how or why clothes are worn. Mannequins are meant to show how clothes will look on a body, but few bodies are afforded time to stand so still. Mannequins should acknowledge that dressing for the job one wants is a formality interfering with the impulse to undress for the life one desires. The mannequins should be displayed on real beds, fucking, or having just fucked. That season’s jeans should be around their ankles, or lying on the floor, one leg inside-out. A sculpture of fiberglass and plastic will never understand the satisfaction of removing the shirt one has worn in the office all day. That would be an inferable joy for people shopping through mannequins hunched in front of computer monitors in a reproduction of a corporate office. Previously, such nontraditional staging of mannequins has found its place in contemporary art. It is much better suited to aspirational commerce.

3. What does a skinned rabbit look like? To be more specific, what does the skinned CGI animated rabbit from the 2016 film Zootopia look like? Is it a 3D wireframe, or did they take the time (for realism's sake) to include flesh and blood that moves beneath the fur? What does that skinned rabbit look like? I imagine it looks less like a rabbit, and more like a human, largely due to the breasts and general “sexing-up” of the cartoon figure.

One should take comfort in the fact that if the rabbit were skinned, it might turn out to have organic tissue below.

If that is the case, one can take greater comfort still in the fact that if they were skinned, there might be the wireframe of a rabbit.

- J.L.

Sam Cooke (b. 1991 in Paris, France) is an artist living and working in New York.