Week in Reviews: Kate O'Donovan Cook at Stephen Haller Gallery

At first glance, Kate O’Donovan Cook’s photographs look like stills from a movie—until you realize that the artist is playing every character, all at the same time. One of Cook’s photos captures her posing in a sumptuous room in the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel as both the scantily clad woman and the buttoned-up man. Another features her sitting in a mythical-looking forest, and yet another standing on the edge of the ocean—in each, her visage is reproduced three times in three different poses.

Part of her first-ever solo show at Chelsea’s Stephen Haller Gallery, Cook’s photographs are a testament to the expressive possibilities of the digital age. In order to take her photographs, Cook sets up the shot and works with a camera on a timer, pressing a button and then taking her place as the subject of the work. And although Cook’s method might seem like a shallow parlor trick, its effects are numerous and complex.

In the Waldorf sequence, Cook’s technique fosters a sense of narrative. The man and woman in the hotel room, captured in various states of undress, prompt the viewer to question what sort of seedy entanglement lies below the surface of the photograph. But upon realizing that both characters are played by the artist, viewers might find themselves wondering instead what sort of statement Cook wishes to make about traditional gender roles and the way they function in viewers’ own relationships.

Cook’s technique can also create a sense of motion impossible in a traditional photograph. In The Model, for example, Cook captures herself posed in the middle of a life drawing class. By layering multiple exposures, Cook creates the illusion of dynamic movement around her. The same student is captured leaning over his drawing, looking at his work, and looking at the model simultaneously. In the midst of all the commotion, however, Cook’s porcelain body anchors the composition, a bulwark of classical form in the midst of the digitized composition. By pairing the classical nude and the life drawing class with digital effects, Cook deftly combines the traditional and the contemporary.

It is clear from her photographs, though, that Cook is a relative newcomer. The light effects in some of the photos are a bit dull and the multiple-figure technique may get old and gimmicky after a while. Her conceit may not be enough to carry her through an entire career, but it is certainly enough to establish that she has a bright future ahead.
If Cook’s insightful and visionary interpretation of traditional media is any indication of the direction in which young artists are moving with the possibilities afforded to them by digital technology, then art viewers have a lot to look forward to.