UP CLOSE #9 Features Tony Cokes's New Video Series OF LIES AND LIARS STUDIES 01 – 05

Artist Tony Cokes premieres his new five-part video series Of Lies and Liars Studies 01 - 05 as the ninth installment of The Shed's Up Close online series. A new video from the series will publish each Sunday starting August 9 through September 6 at 6 PM on The Shed's YouTube Channel, Instagram account (@theshedny), and website (theshed.org).

In this series, Cokes presents studies for a new body of work titled Of Lies and Liars featuring alternate blue and red slides with quotations from journalist David Frum's Atlantic article "This Is Trump's Fault." Cokes sets Frum's words, which indict the current administration's mishandling of the COVID-19 pandemic, to music by artists from the Postal Service to Lali Puna.

The vignette-style videos are a return to Cokes's ongoing exploration of evil in Western philosophical thought and its role in the structuring of society, this time in the context of the denials of scientific fact related to the pandemic. Each of Cokes's studies is an experiment in duration and style and exists as a methodology for the artist to sharpen ideas for a new, larger media work.

In the summer of 2019, a selection of Cokes's work, including the new commission Before and After the Studio (2019), was presented in the exhibition Collision/Coalition at The Shed. The videos in this exhibition arranged appropriated materials including pop music and news articles in a confrontational collage to explore the relationship between the artist, the artist's studio, and gentrification.

ABOUT THE ARTIST
Tony Cokes lives and works in Providence, Rhode Island, where he serves as a professor in the Department of Modern Culture and Media at Brown University. Cokes's analytical strategy is one of reframing and repositioning. His critiques are informed by contemporary cultural studies, poststructuralist theory, and popular texts; he quotes from sources ranging from Louis Althusser, David Bowie, Malcolm X, and Catherine Clément to Public Enemy and William Burroughs. His works are often assemblages of archival footage, images from Hollywood films, text commentary, voiceover, and popular music.

Cokes's video artwork uses quotes sourced from writings and scholarly texts by philosophers, musicians, politicians, and cultural figures. Placing these words on brightly colored, presentation-style backgrounds, Cokes then sets them to soundtracks of popular music from Drake to Morrisey. Through these juxtapositions, Cokes's work invites the viewer to engage with political ideas and the reality of shared social conditions, from the power of the media to celebrity culture.