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Spotlight ReviewsCONNECTICUTEzra and Cecile Zilkha Gallery at Wesleyan University/Middletownwww.wesleyan.edu/cfa Brett Cook-Dizney: Meditations
Brett Cook-Dizney’s large, complex installations provoke false assumptions, among them that Cook-Dizney is a primitive, or “outsider,” artist, and that he is an old-school political activist, stuck in the 1960s. Cook-Dizney’s work is indeed political, aligning itself with progressive notions of community and race that may be seen as leftist-radical, but he is not a ‘60s throwback. As an artist, Cook-Dizney is no primitive. He received a BA in art, with a minor in education, from the University of California at Berkeley in 1991, a combination that points to his political and community concerns. As evidenced by his work on display at Zilkha Gallery, Cook-Dizney chooses to use his art as a conduit to addressing contemporary issues in his and others’ communities. For Cook-Dizney, it’s clear that art and politics not only mix but are inseparable. The gallery has left a lot of room between Cook-Dizney’s elaborate creations, which allow them to breathe freely. Each piece has its own niche where a visitor can linger over each installation without feeling crowded by another. This allows one to soak in all of the imagery that Cook-Dizney has literally piled up at each site. The works are vast and sprawling, infused with street attitude and a bracing blast of hip-hop and roots culture. Cook-Dizney works on a macro level, employing portraiture, text, found objects, and formal and informal art media; the painting, drawing, color theory, graffiti art, spray paint, etc., become shrines celebrating numerous cultural avatars, from radical writers and African/African-American cultural icons, including that most revered family figure, the grandmother. In this respect, Cook-Dizney’s installations do have a relationship with outsider art, in terms of their obsessive detail and intensely personal iconography.
The altarlike piece that Cook-Dizney calls Documentation of a Grandma is just that: an inventory of the objects and attitudes that surround the figure of grandmothers in African-American life. Cook-Dizny celebrates this matriarchal figure with a vast array of found items spilling out from “grandma’s” central image—vitamins, medications, cosmetics, hair products, a girdle, needlepoint pillows with such homilies as “Grandma knows best” stitched across their midsections. It’s hard not to be moved to both laughter and tears when standing in front of this monument to our forebears. Documentation of Blackness follows similar construction and theme. An overwhelming celebration of African roots, the work spills over with books, plants, portraits, and other objects and names that represent a broad pantheon of African-American culture, including Ida B. Wells, Gwendolyn Brooks, bell hooks, Bill Russell, The Nicholas Brothers, John Coltrane, Angela Davis, Toni Morrison, and many more. Steve Starger |
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