Perrotin is pleased to present Koak’s first major European exhibition in France. Lake Margrethe is the San Francisco-based artist’s second solo show with the gallery.
The exhibition offers multiple entry points into Koak’s work. The energy emanating from its forms and colors is immediately palpable. Trained in the visual literary medium of Comics, Koak has brought into the field of painting the communicative power of the line, which she likens to “a sense of language that runs across my practice (through drawing, painting, and sculpture), one that’s tone or intonation can shift dramatically with the slightest shift in curve or weight.”
Less discernible in the works is the autobiographical subtext of the exhibition with its discreet representations of familial and intergenerational relationships. For several paintings in the exhibition, she evoked her own family ties and memories, portraying them in inscrutably varying degrees of detail and abstraction, such as in the three “window portraits” featuring her grandmother (Nancy in Blue), her mother (Carmine), and Koak herself (Self Portrait from a Green Window).
Each of the four rooms of the exhibition embodies principal themes in her practice. The first room prefaces the interplay between abstraction and realism in Koak’s constant exploration of the figure. It introduces a recurring motif — shells and spirals — two forms that thematize not only a connection to nature, but also the boundaries between our bodies and the external. The second, the main room, foregrounds the notion of a protected, safe space, and depicts the capricious nature of transitional spaces between interior and exterior. The third room, featuring drawing and sculpture, is immersed wallto- wall in a pale blue-gray tone resembling the sky and acts as a pause in the journey, like a moment of introspection. The fourth room is built around the color which inspired the exhibition’s overarching theme – green – and highlights the fragility and tenuous relationship between domestic space and nature.
Koak’s expressive use of color demonstrates a mastery which bears through all her pieces from spectacular large formats, to the intimacy of work on paper, to human-scale sculpture. On close observation, her attention to detail is equally apparent: the rainbow-hued eye of the dark red figure (Weathervane), the glimpse of flesh-pink from underneath the green flames surrounding the dancing figures (The Dancers), and the grainy texture of the sculpted ivory swirls in Magritte’s Door, the result of meticulous layering paint made from wood pencil shavings saved from the artist’s studio.
Behind these enigmatic figures and scenes is an intricately woven theme linking two seemingly unrelated subjects. The first is the lake that gives the exhibition its title, three syllables evoking childhood summers spent waterside by Koak and her family, refreshing swims, a simple, happy kind of joy. But like in the fable that makes up the first chapter of Rachel Carson’s famous ecological treatise Silent Spring, the idyll belongs to the past. Once a paradise, the site in northern Michigan is today persistently ravaged by chemicals dumped there by a military base. In a recent interview (1) Koak shares: “I have memories of my childhood in Michigan, where green encapsulates both the vibrant woods around my grandfather’s log cabin and the green waters of Lake Margarethe, where we swam each summer unaware it was poisoned.”
The second theme revolves around the pigment of emerald green, one of the most popular colors of the 19th century. This vibrant color, seen in some of the paintings in the exhibition, had multiple variants at that time (such as Scheele’s Green and Paris Green) and was widely used by the textile and paper industries, as well as by painters. However, like the lake, it turned out to be highly toxic as it was made from an arsenic derivative. It is believed that this pigment was responsible for the severe diabetes that plagued Cézanne, who loved to use it, Van Gogh’s neurological disorders, as well as Monet’s diminishing vision later in life. It was also used as a rat poison in Paris in the 1930s.
Beautiful memories can be tainted by the awareness of destruction; an invisible danger corrupts everything, even that which is supposed to produce beauty; a color can be used to exterminate a supposedly harmful species (2) – all of this perfectly encapsulates the mercurial nature of dualism in of the exhibition. Koak states, “My interest was specifically in the color’s ability to capture both the vibrancy of life and illness, duality in nature to be both essential and at times unsafe, and this sort of oscillating vibrancy between states of being exuberantly filled with life and haunted by malady. The show is very much about living in the liminal space balanced between these two worlds.” The lake — that gives its unity of place to the exhibition – serves as the perfect allegory of this ambiguity, a conceptual dynamic that allows interpretations to intersect and overlap in oftentimes contradictory movements.
Complexity is central to the artist’s practice. It should be noted, however, that it tends less towards a form of melancholy than towards a constant staging of a principle of duality, which defines and deeply structures her practice. In Koak’s work, nature is a shadow, landscapes are bodies, and the lake bears a woman’s name. And as mental worlds blend into existing places, supposedly safe retreats are exposed to the light. Is the woman in Nancy in Blue positioned at the back or at the front of the pictorial plane? Is the body depicted in Self Portrait from a Green Window (after Lois Dodd) a reflection or perhaps a vision from inside the house? The layering of strata with which the artist constructs her works sometimes renders their reading indecipherable. Liminal spaces are omnipresent, with almost every canvas representing a window, a door, or a passageway, blurring the boundaries between memory and dream, observation and fantasy. Even the three works in the exhibition that draw specifically from works by historic artists (3) seem to stem directly from the artist’s imagination.
The Dancers, which anchors the final room of the exhibition, depicts three figures immersed in a natural environment, with a distant domestic space barely visible on the horizon. Koak reiterates that “This play between different modes of depicting the figure extends the exhibition’s themes of boundaries, health, and illness.” The painting deepens the exploration of transitional spaces between ourselves and nature, highlighting the tension between being fully present in our bodies and the experience of disassociation. The figures — representing Koak’s mother and her two sisters — dance joyfully in a circle amidst a storm, embodying a celebration of resilience, regeneration, and life. As the viewer is drawn into this celebratory scene, they are invited to reflect on the fluid, often permeable relationship between self and the shifting terrains of identity, memory, and connection.
1. Juxtapoz, Fall 2024 Quarterly.
2. Conscious of the ecological footprint of her artistic activity, Koak has implemented sustainable practices in her studio, including an innovative treatment system for filtering chemically contaminated water accumulated from washing brushes and tools.
3. The Dancers evokes Matisse’s various dances as well as a detail from William Blake’s Oberon, Titania and Puck with Fairies Dancing (ca. 1786); Magritte’s Door is a reference to The Unexpected Answer (1932) by René Magritte; Self Portrait from a Green Window (after Lois Dodd) is based on Self Portrait in Greenhouse Window (1971) by the American artist Lois Dodd.
Born in 1981 in Lansing, Michigan, USA
Lives and works in San Francisco, USA
Koak’s work portrays the complex duality of identity and human nature through a mastery of the line which extends across drawing, painting and sculpture. Rendered with exquisite technique and effortless mark-making, her emotionally charged figures are imbued with a compelling sense of agency and inner life.
Koak is a graduate of the MFA in Comics program at California College of the Arts. Recent institutional exhibitions include Crafting Radicality (2023) at de Young Museum in San Francisco, and New Time: Art and Feminisms in the 21st Century at Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive | BAMPFA, in California, USA. Her work will be on view in Infinite Regress: Mystical Abstraction from the Permanent Collection and Beyond at Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art in Kansas City, Missouri, USA from September 20, 2024 to February 23, 2025.
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