MFA Candidate Zahria Cook Exhibition in Greenville, SC

Lamar Dodd School of Art is congratulates MFA candidate Zahria Cook on her upcoming exhibition at Tiger Strikes Asteroid Greenville. The exhibition opens this Friday, October 1st, and runs through October 30th. There will be an opening reception on Friday from 6-9pm.

back like the wound, and you are the stitch brings together the work of two Georgia-based artists Caleb Jamel Brown and Zahria Cook, and will open on Friday, October 1st and run through Saturday, October 30th. There will be an opening reception on Friday, October 1st from 6-9pm. The show is curated and organized by TSA GVL member Kara Blanken Soper.

back like the wound, and you are the stitch takes its title from Tyehimba Jess’s 2005 poem martha promise receives leadbelly, 1935, in which acts of labor simultaneously destroy and restore. This exhibition investigates themes of duality and reclamation through gesture, labor, and process, and explores the use of abstraction as the vehicle for discovering a contemporary Southern Black vernacular narrative. Through the display of site-specific installation, painting, and mixed-media work by Caleb Jamel Brown and Zahria Cook, viewers are invited to contemplate the liminal space between representation and abstraction, patriotism and rebellion, the “made” and the “found,” the wound and the stitch.

Caleb Jamel Brown is an Atlanta-based multidisciplinary artist working primarily in collage, photography, painting, and installation. Brown’s work often uses upcycled fabrics and paper, layered with photographs, paint, thread, clothespins, and various other materials to communicate the act of thinking and working through themes of labor and leisure, ancestral history, mental health in black communities, and the use of abstraction and vernacular as the foundation for larger cultural narratives. Caleb has exhibited and participated in residences throughout the United States and abroad including PATA, Lodz, Poland; Proyecto Ace, Buenos Aires, Argentina; Coleman Arts Center, York, AL; Doomed Gallery, London, England; Plough Gallery, Tifton, GA; and Burnaway and MINT, both in Atlanta, GA.

Zahria Cook is from Memphis, TN and is currently living and working in Athens, GA. Cook is an abstract painter working primarily in oil and watercolor. Her process uses intention to navigate every decision she makes and how being black influences these decisions. She holds a Bachelor of Fine Arts in painting and drawing from the University of Memphis (Memphis, TN). She is a current MFA candidate at the Lamar Dodd School of Art at the University of Georgia, Athens, GA.