Canicular Days

Aubrey Longley-Cook 

Canicular Days

Local artist Aubrey Longley-Cook’s Canicular Days is a study in fastidious craftsmanship and layered, insouciant humor. The exhibition explores the artist’s relationship with Southern California, his home and workplace for more than half a decade.

I combine the practices of animation and embroidery, drawing narratives from the dialogue between the two forms and inspiration from the process of building work frame by frame and stitch by stitch. I’m inspired by GIF culture, queer community, and work that integrates domestic crafts with new media. - Aubrey Longley-Cook

The Lodge gallery presents a selection of works by local artist Aubrey Longley-Cook. Canicular Days is a study in fastidious craftsmanship and layered, insouciant humour that explores the artist’s relationship with Southern California, his home and workplace for more than half a decade. 

The solo exhibition feels telepathic in its timing. Marrying digital prowess with traditional fiber art, the artist’s lovingly embroidered pieces were largely created in Longley-Cook’s elegant backyard studio (christened the ‘block’ in honor of famed minimalist Donald Judd). Here, a stone’s throw from the iconic Paramount Lot, where palm trees and architectural pastiche reign, one can’t help but ponder the myths and machinations of Tinseltown. 

SOLD, one of the exhibition’s prominent pieces, takes a frame from the film Chinatown, arguably the quintessential exploration of Los Angeles and its foundational and deeply conflicting fables, and immortalizes it in thread. Longley-Cook’s practice, which also includes animation and occasional work in films, pulls from divergent aspects of his life drawing on queer movements, popular culture, internet ephemera and cinema. In a single frame, imbued with a kind of pixelated elegance, SOLD provokes questions that feel as vital today as when the film was released in 1974. 

Embroidery - a proudly heirloom practice - has often functioned as a Trojan Horse for resonant and often subversive ideas. In the artist’s oeuvre, a moment will seduce with its beauty and tactility but also commands an exploration into a world that’s more complicated and malevolent. Regardless, perception is leavened by an arch sensibility honed, in large part, during Longley-Cook’s years living in Atlanta after graduating from RISD. 

Taking cues from drag culture and the nascent Internet scroll culture, early pieces such as i don’t know her, with Mariah Carey as its subject, are imbued with a canny prescience. Both plaintive and exhilarating, Runaway marries craft and technical skill in a digital animation based on 14 separate embroidered frames. A series of palm trees, perpetual icons of the original Californian dream machine, which were produced during lockdown, are exemplars of Longley-Cook’s singular purview. A snapshot, a chimera. As Jack Nicholson’s character Jake Gittes foretold in Chinatown “There's no time to be shocked by the truth.”