Sherry Frumkin Gallery is pleased to present Oahu Before Dawn, an exhibition of work by California artist Dean De Cocker. The thirteen works in the show continue an on-going series the artist calls “Blue Jackets Return.â€
Beginning with the first winged-shaped structures from 1989, De Cocker has explored formal elements by transforming flat, two-dimensional surfaces into three-dimensional objects in the cool, impersonal style and exacting finish clearly influenced by artists like Robert Irwin, Peter Alexander and Larry Bell. De Cocker graduated Cal Poly Pomona and earned his MFA from Claremont in the late 1980s where the influence of these “Light and Space†artists was strong.
In De Cocker’s works, surfboards, mailboxes, aircraft structures, wings, propellers, heavy machinery and architectural works are conceptual elements, transformed first into drawings then, via techniques of aircraft construction, into fabricated objects of inner structures and outer coverings that create volumetric enclosures. Like the artists who inspired him, De Cocker employs technologies of the Southern California based engineering and aerospace industries to develop these sensuous, light-filled and “whimsical, impractical devices–eccentric experiments in lighter-than-air craft or furniture hybridized into non-utility.†(Suvan Geer)
The titles of De Cocker’s works, are taken from the names of World War II battles and objects of the South Pacific and are a reflection of his interest in the construction techniques of World War II aircraft.
De Cocker was born in Southern California, and in 2003 moved to Turlock in Northern California where he is Associate Professor of Art at California State University, Stanislaus. He taught sculpture at California State University, San Bernardino and was Adjunct Professor in Studio Practices/Theory in Sculpture, Painting and Drawing at Claremont Graduate University, from 1990 to 2003.
