Sam Cockrell
Bio: Sam Cockrell makes paintings, sculptures, and videos that think about the animals that find themselves in the locus of America's cultural and political tension. He was born in 1989 in Colonial Williamsburg, Virginia and received his BFA in 2-dimensional art from the University of Tennessee. Sam Cockrell received his MFA from Columbia University in 2015. He was an awarded a residency at Wassaic, in 2016. His work has been exhibited in New York at Launch F18, Judith Charles Gallery, among others, as well as at Fjord Art Space in Philadelphia, Pennyslvania.
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Contemporary painting is a vampire, feasting from bones torn off the corpse of history. I fear my paintings are only skeletons born as ghosts, equally of discontent and love -- I hate paintings that hide behind critical ambiguity, and yet I make them. The distance placed between ourselves and our world is poisonous, for me the antidote is deepened sincerity; painting animals.
Thesis Exhibition
Artist Statement: Please write about your work and what it means to you.
My art is not about nature, and barely about archiving. I see the archive as no longer rooted in Euclidean space, existing within an indeterminate seam between everyday life and a sort of pansophical, virtual [on-line] presence. How does ART fit in there? Should I be addressing this shift didactically, or does simply producing work now Hegelian-ly worm these ideas into the work? Something I’ve been thinking about a lot recently is the (perhaps fraught) task of creating a body of images that is waiting to exist or be introduced into the Larger Body of All Images, which seems to be parallel to the ‘2015 archive.’ I started painting animals because I wanted to paint something that meant something—I paint them now because I’m more interested in where and how they belong. Any collection of images under one title can be categorized. I give them names of Simpson’s episodes. I think I accidentally painted the same cat twice.
