Christie Contemporary is pleased to present Form and Fraction, a solo exhibition of work by Montreal artist Naomi Cook, opening Friday, March 17 and continuing until April 22. 

With her multidisciplinary practice, Cook alternates between transmuting data to form and form to cipher. With an eye to the codified—ranging from money markets to bodily comportment—Cook’s drawings distill sites of complex exchange to expressions in abbreviation.

Comprehensive research into momentary market collapses and recoveries, known as flash crashes, immersed Cook in algorithms, analyses and opaque vocabularies specific to the world of high finance, but it was perhaps the rapidity of money movement that held her fascination, precipitating work that visualized this data in charted forms, transforming the dizzying trading of stocks into abbreviated, tidy abstractions, with the labour of their making extending well beyond the duration of the occurrence they describe.

Her ongoing suite of figural work pictures the human form in near-classical but often contorted poses, with anatomy secondary to gesture, as fluid, meandering lines conclude in hands and feet, while the interconnecting bits might remain somewhat more ambiguous. As a site of communication, the body conveys innumerable messages, it has a language, and Cook builds a visual glossary in shorthand, available to be expanded by the viewer.

With both bodies of work, Cook proposes a compression, suspending elements of systems that are by nature in constant flux—sites of interaction—and acquire meaning through that movement. In her abbreviated translations to image, Cook traces the trajectory of that accumulation.


NAOMI COOK (b. 1982, lives and works in Montreal) studied Art and Philosophy at Concordia University, Montreal. Her technique stems from interest in engravings, sound, and visual representations of data. Her work has been featured in several group exhibitions in Montreal and abroad. Her works were selected by Canadian Art as favourites of the 2015 edition of PAPIER Art Fair, Montreal. In 2016, she was in Paris at Récollets as part of the Résidences Croisées France-Québec.