Tony Cokes

Of Lies and Liars Studies 01 – 05, 2020

The Shed, New York

Sundays at 6 PM, August 9 – September 6, 2020

Tony Cokes premieres his new five-part video series Of Lies and Liars Studies 01-05 as the final commission in the summer edition of The Shed’s Up Close online series on Sunday, August 9 at 6 pm EST on The Shed’s Instagram (@theshedny) and website (theshed.org/). A new video from the five-part series will premiere each Sunday through September 6.

In this final installment of Up Close, Cokes presents studies for a new body of work titled Of Lies and Liars. Alternate blue and red slides display 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.

Each study is an experiment in duration and style and exists as a methodology for Cokes’ to sharpen ideas for a new larger media work. The commission for Up Close is composed of looser sketches of video that act as an architecture for a longer engagement with this text and theme.

The vignette-style videos return to Cokes’ ongoing exploration of evil as a philosophical theory and the connections between capital and capitalism, this time in the context of recent denials of scientific fact related to the pandemic.

In the summer of 2019, a selection of Cokes’ work, including the new commission. B4 & After the Studio (2009 – 2019), was included 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.

For more information, please visit The Shed's website.

Image: Tony Cokes, Of Lies and Liars Study 04, 2020 (still). Courtesy the artist, Greene Naftali, New York, Hannah Hoffman, Los Angeles, and Electronic Arts Intermix, New York.