Carrie Cook’s paintings invite you in intimately with recognizable objects—coffee cups, cigarettes, salt-rimmed margarita glasses, orange slices, tables, waterfalls—but slip into a feeling of otherness, something that eludes exact recognition. Cook’s paintings move between a large and small scale, both which require and are treated with athletic vigor and sustained attention. This becomes apparent when looking at Cook’s surfaces of her paintings; her precision and looseness within the same picture plane, where certain areas are worked in a precise and dense manner, while others come through with light-handed brushstrokes. The paintings feel elemental, emotional, sometimes wet and fluid, other times dry and earthy. That movement between worlds is essential in Cook’s work. Cook expressed: “I’m interested in the way pushing one’s body and psyche through the physicality of painting brings psychological content to the surface.” Elements of Cook’s painting are sourced from her personal photo archive, which she prints out and arranges on a table to construct, collaging together disparate experiences thematically or formally. A red patterned carpet rises up against a circular brown table in Brown Table, Red Rug—two disparate autobiographical experiences, places, and elements transcend image into painting. Cook’s paintings evoke a space that we already inhabit and yet cannot discern, the hallway in a dream in which we never reach the end.