Michelle Cooke, “Paths to the Horizon”
by Ann Landi
Aaron Payne Fine Art, Santa Fe
Continuing through October 31, 2026
Full disclosure: I have been personal friends and professional colleagues with Michelle Cooke for nearly fifteen years, ever since I moved to New Mexico. She worked as my curator when I ran The Wright Contemporary in Taos, and I could not have pulled off the many wonderful shows we organized without her unerring eye.
Does this make me prejudiced when it comes to reviewing her work? Yes, of course. But it also makes me privileged to follow her process in a more intimate way than is possible from just occasionally popping into a show.
Cooke’s aims have been consistent and her investigations wide-ranging within a relatively narrow spectrum of goals. Whether it’s a six-foot-tall “kimono” made from steel and copper (from her “Vesti” series) or a modest drawing in colored pencil, the artist strives for, in her words, “fragility, transparency, balance, weightlessness, and gravity.” And by and large she succeeds.
Seldom, though, has there been much of a chance to see her works in dialogue with one another, and so it’s a pleasure to see them assembled in a small but choice display of drawings and glass reliefs.
Some of my favorites are here, including several drawings from a series called “White Light,” realized in ink and colored pencil on Arches paper, each 12.5-inch square seeming to glow with a quiet intensity that belies their modest size and means. The drawings from Cooke’s “Horizon” series, all graphite on paper, achieve a similar end but the allusions to the real world — specifically landscape — are stronger and more ominous. They presage a gathering storm that could wallop you into the next state.
One of Cooke’s favorite mediums is glass. She uses rectangular shards, the same slides beloved of biology labs and art-history departments from another era, that cast subtle shadows against a pristine white ground, setting up a tricky dynamic between the real and the illusory. “Rain,” a tumble of glass fragments falling asymmetrically across a panel, manages through purely abstract means to suggest the drama of a windowpane lashed by a sudden squall. The possibilities for transparency and geometry to intersect in modest but powerful ways are also apparent in her “Glass Drawings.” The largest of these is about 22 inches square and possesses a dizzying quality reminiscent of Piranesi.
The weak points in this selection are the drawings of leaves, which are simply too fragile and ephemeral to make much of an impression. Also negligible is a tangle of tubing, called “Glass Knot 1,” encased in a Plexiglas box, which is more like a cute paperweight than a sculpture of any real aesthetic interest.
Because the works here touch on more than a decade’s worth of art making, they convey a sense of how Cooke’s restless eye and hand operate, but not enough. I’d love to see a full chronological survey encompassing the lengthy career of an artist who finds the sublime in subtlety and restraint.
For more than 30 years Ann Landi has reported on the art world for ARTnews, The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, and magazines like Smithsonian and Art & Antiques. From 2016 till 2022, she published a website for artists called Vasari21, which has now been repurposed into a weekly Substack newsletter, Vasari21Redux. She operated the Wright Contemporary in Taos, NM, from 2022 to 2024.
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