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Blade Study presents All Creatures Great and Small by Sam Cockrell (b. 1989, VA), the artist's first solo exhibition at the gallery. For the past eleven years, Cockrell has been recording a daily encounter with a mammal, bug, or bird, often seen in his neighborhood of Ridgewood, Queens. He then returns to his studio and transforms the digital image into an airbrushed painting, usually on 8 by 10 inch canvases. The small works are titled by the date of capture, though some include mention of a notable occasion. On 6/7/23, for example, a bird traverses an eerie field of purple. The verso of this painting reads WILDFIRE SMOKE FILLED THE SKY.
A pigeon crossing the road. A slug on a garbage bag. Often, the subjects of Cockrell’s paintings are ubiquitous and undersung city dwellers. Other times they illustrate an encroachment on their territory, such as a raccoon pressing its palm on a sliding glass door. Many of the paintings, especially the larger ones, include reflections or mirroring—a house mouse’s nose elongated by the reflection off a curved metal rod or three geese swimming across a pond. Cockrell’s choice of medium, airbrush, transmits the works’ quiddity, a sfumato blur that undermines the painter’s gaze. The effect warps and swaps the perspective—this is how the mammal, bug, or bird sees, or doesn’t see, the moment of encounter with the artist—softening the hierarchy of the human position. The tool—an Iwata HP-C Plus—keeps the artist from needing to touch the canvas to make the work. In avoiding the hand and the subsequent metaphors of the brushstroke, there is no imposition made upon the mammal, bug, or bird; the attempt at depiction avoids unnecessary disturbance.
Cockrell’s body of work and process also evince an archival impulse. He keeps and maintains years’ worth of acrylic paint accumulation and old mixing tools, handmade paper, and empty Rolling Rock cases, which hold the completed archive labeled by month, date, and year. Seen together, the work recalls the all-but-extinct, please-bring-it-back snapshot quality of photography. Diaries, journals, image banks, pillow books, material archives. These are the stuff of memory keepers, those who acknowledge the imperative of keeping records of the lives we are connected to. These lives need not be human. Cockrell exists somewhere in a world composed of On Kawara’s “Today” series, Oulipo writing constraints, Audubon, and William Wegman’s Weimaraners—a world of makers and thinkers committed to commitment. Artists whose medium is enduring-ness and whose tactics are collection and experience.
Text by Meg Whiteford
Meg Whiteford is a writer and editor. She works at the Studio Museum in Harlem, where she edits exhibition catalogues and didactics. She has written for Artforum, Aperture, The Believer, Brooklyn Rail, BOMB, Garage, Liber, In the Mood, Ursula, X-TRA, and more.
