Jo Cook’s experimentations with the photographic medium were brief, before returning to her practice of other forms of printmaking. These photographs were taken in the early 1970s at a house Cook rented in Vancouver’s Strathcona neighborhood. The photographs remained in slide format until the early 2000s when Cook rediscovered them, had them developed, and enlarged at a photography lab. After which, she chose to over-paint the images with gouache, adding forms and figures to the surfaces. The painted elements in these works reflect Cook’s long-standing interest in alchemy, with the forms resembling alchemical instruments like crucibles and alembics. In two of the works, Untitled (Geometric abstractions in blue) and Untitled (Geometric abstractions in red), the contrasting substances inside the vessels—more solid at the bottom and gaseous at the top—suggest a transmutational process, a core concept in alchemical thought.
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Jo Cook, Untitled (Geometric abstractions in yellow), n.d. Gouache on photograph. SFU Art Collection. Gifts of Wesley Mulvin, 2024.
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Title
Untitled (Geometric abstractions in red, blue, and yellow)
Artist
Jo Cook
Collection
SFU Art Collection
Year Acquired
2024
Artists
Jo Cook (1946-2021) was an artist publisher based on Mayne Island, BC, preceded by years of practice in Vancouver with the Vancouver Women’s Book Store and other community publishing projects. After attending Printed Matter in New York in 1978, Cook amassed a vast collection of zines, comix, artists books, posters, and flyers. In 2004 she curated (self)Publish or Perish for Open Space in Victoria, Cyclops Dreams (with Owen Plummer) for Access Gallery, and Tales from the Cyclops Library for Third Space Gallery in St John. She organized exhibitions at Lucky's Comics and the lowercase reading room in Vancouver. Cook participated in artist residencies in Tabor, Czech Republic; Tallinn, Estonia; and at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design. She was the Artists' Books Research Resident (ABRRR) at Emily Carr University of Art + Design in 2016.
In 2005, Wesley Mulvin and Jo Cook founded Perro Verlag Books by Artists. Perro Verlag has published over 125 titles including comics, zines, poetry chapbooks, pamphlets, broadsides, and works of short fiction by artists and authors including Derya Akay, derek beaulieu, Brandy Fedoruk, Kasper Feyrer, Ted Hiebert, Doug Jarvis, Demi London, Petra Poldlahová, Sally Rees, Jackson Two Bears, and James Whitman.