TCA Exhibits
The Realm of Perception
Larry Bell and Michelle Cooke
October 24 – November 29
Free & open to the public
Gallery Hours: Encore Gallery is open before any TCA Event and by appointment, call TCA’s Office to schedule a viewing during business hours – (575) 758 – 2052
ABOUT THE SHOW
Perceptual art exists in the space between what we see and what we understand. It begins with the visible world, the shifting qualities of light, color, texture, form, and movement- but extends beyond representation into the intimate territory of experience. In this realm, perception is not simply the act of looking; it becomes an active process of interpretation, memory, sensation, and emotion.
Ultimately, perceptual art reminds us that reality is experienced rather than simply observed. It asks us to consider the fragile boundary between the world before us and the world constructed within us. In that space of uncertainty where vision meets consciousness, the artwork becomes less an object to be understood and more an experience to be entered.
ARTIST STATEMENTS & BIOS
Larry Bell
Larry Bell is one of the most noteworthy representatives of abstract art in the postwar period. His career has spanned nearly six decades and has given him an audience in all the major art centers of the world.
Bell’s medium, “light on surface,” has often used the technology of thin-film deposition of vaporized metals and minerals on glass surfaces. His work has evolved in a number of directions, beginning with constructions, glass boxes, and standing wall glass panel sculptures. Other bodies of work include Vapor Drawings, Mirage works (collages) on paper and canvas, Furniture de Lux, Sumer (a series of calligraphic bronze figures up to 30 feet in height), and Fractions, a series of 10,000 small 10 x 10-inch collage works on paper.
Bell exhibits extensively in museums and galleries internationally and in the U.S. and has been awarded numerous public art commissions. He was born in Chicago in 1939 and grew up in the San Fernando Valley of California. He briefly attended Chouinard Art Institute in Los Angeles, where he met other students and teachers who would become lifelong friends and fellow artists. He moved to Taos, New Mexico, in 1973 and currently maintains studios there.
Michelle Cooke
‘My work is perceptual. Gravity and light inform the structure of my three dimensional studies in light mediated by glass. Years ago a friend gave me several boxes of glass slide covers from an art history department and suggested I think of something to do with them. Among the many things I now know about installing glass on a wall (including, obviously, that it breaks and will hurt you) I’ve also learned the glass pieces must be a. vertical, b. perpendicular to the surface and c. delineated only by light, natural and/or artificial. The compositions for the installations have evolved as well from a representations of music, lyrical free-form gestures, geometric shapes, and most recently simple blocks and lines that fall from the ceiling, hover above the floor, hide in corners and alter the character of a space in extremely subtle ways. The recurring themes in my work are fragility, transparency, balance, weightlessness, and gravity. This work with glass focuses on the inherent tension between its transparency as a light medium and its aggressiveness as a projecting grid.
I have not worked in a vacuum. Early on the work of Robert Irwin, Larry Bell, and James Turrell, as well as exposure to the conceptual work of Bruce Nauman gave me a foundation for the perceptual direction of my work and an understanding of and appreciation for the rigor necessary to realize my ideas. It has been a captivating pursuit and one which continues to teach.’
– Michelle Cooke, Taos, NM 2025
Michelle Cooke holds an M.F.A. from Claremont Graduate University. Her current work involves sculpture, drawing and installation. She lives and works in Taos, NM.
