Then she might start some digital color studies, adjusting the whole image to a non-photo blue that will allow her to print out the work, draw over it, and rescan the new draft. The non-photo blue technique comes from Koak’s background in comics (she received her MFA in the medium from the California College of the Arts) and allows for annotations in a pale shade of blue that scanners and printers can be set to ignore.
“I don’t entirely believe that there’s a single state of finished. It’s usually more of a series of waves peaking,” says Koak. “If the tension of striving after perfection is a sort of holding of your breath, then it’s important to include a loose moment of exhale—a shaky pattern, a splatter of drips, something that my initial instinct wants to write off as lazy. It’s important to me not to push things so far that they are infallible because they never could be, it’s a sort of therapy to an anxious brain that wants to control everything.”
This question of control is major theme underlying the recent work that will go on display at The Driver. Some of the work is downright menacing. One shows a female figure in the foreground with her hair combed by a looming, dark, anonymous, figure in the background. The tension in the hair, the discomfort in the foregrounded figure’s eyes. The stark ruby and sapphire color palette. And whose hand is it that caresses the foregrounded figure’s forearm?
Koak has a penchant—she is well known even—for the playful way she addresses the human body. Limbs stretch and collide and curl and appear immense and weightless at the same time. It is just as believable in her world, as in the painting referenced above, that this hand on the forearm is the foregrounded figure’s own, in an act of self-love, of that it belongs to someone outside the frame, belongs to us, belongs to someone that makes treats this wide-eyed person so full of distrust and disquiet and distress, as less a person with agency than an object to be fondled at whim.
“In a lot of ways, it’s part of the same conversations of my earlier works. I have noticed that almost all of my exhibitions tend toward centering on ideas of duality, both in conscious and unconscious ways—and that duality very often has to do with the distinction between ourselves and others,” says Koak. “But for this show it is more about merging that duality, looking at the places where those parts get muddied, where we subtly absorb one another only to become more of ourselves.”
It is often important to me to put things together that wouldn’t initially feel harmonious, or of the same tonality.”.”
In another painting, a woman lays restfully reposed along the floor while a cigarette burns in an ashtray and a cat watches her from a chair. Cats play an interesting role in her work: as gargoyles protecting, as sources of comfort and play. “Sometimes I think I’ve mythicized them a bit, turned them into dragons, or warped them into something that feels like a translation of a cat,” she says. They watch and interact and play tricks.
In Koak’s works, cats are the record of our daily lives that bears witness but cannot understand. They are a stone tablet in the desert. A record only that a record was made—of what? Unknown. There is no knowledge left in all the world that can teach us how to read their minds. And our inability to read the cats only casts starker relief on our inability to read other human figures, let alone read ourselves.
Below the cat’s gaze and beside the reclined figure, there are sundry pieces of paper clipped and snipped next to a pair of scissors. Her hands are clasped, and she looks off-frame. Are the hands held in longing? Are they held in fear? Does she stare at the past? At the future? At someone who has just entered the door?
Koak says, “I’ve been thinking a lot about the self—or, more specifically, how the self isn’t really this lone single thing that we idealize it to be. To be a person often feels like being a conglomeration of different identities that get tangled together. And those identities are often constructed through internalizing aspects or personas of the surrounding world—a fiction, a part of a friend or loved one, a stand-in for broader societal role, a historical trope, or an archetype reimagined. Essentially, we’re these little feedback loops with the world around us, magpie-ing the bits of life that suit us, until we are us.”
While The Driver is set to premier in just a few weeks, Koak has many other projects at the ready to take its place. She is, for instance, learning how to flocculate the acrylic from her post-painting wastewater, which will be good for the environment and reward her with a bunch of acrylic paint that can be dried out and used on sculpture. Another project will span multiple galleries and center on the idea of heat and nature, which will include new paintings as well as bronzes and furniture.
More immediately, there’s her residency at the Tamarind Institute in New Mexico, as well as large paintings to finish for upcoming shows in San Francisco and London. And, of course, her publication project Penalty Club.
“I think the most interesting projects to me are always the ones that present a puzzle,” Koak reflects. “I like being challenged and I get incredibly bored if I’m not learning something new, so areas where different mediums clash together tend to be the places that I’m most interested in working.”*