Our Enemy Is Not Of The Flesh
Flesh as Medium, Community as Canvas: The Transformative Power of King Cobra's Art
Written by Jesse Cameron Alick
All images of the exhibition White Meat were shot by Charles Benton
All images courtesy of the artist and JTT, New York
When you walk into a room that Cobra is working in, you can feel the magic in the air. It’s in the stillness, the silence, the audience members staring unblinking, especially the nervous white people scratching their chins. Something is happening here at her new exhibit, “White Meat.” It’s the soil from the grave of the truly evil “doctor” who murdered Black women for the sake of “scientific research,” sown delicately into the silicon formed to look like the flesh of the bastard, powerful totems. The dreadlocks, which remind you of every self-righteous hippie thinking they knew more about your culture than you, are now made to look scalped off the skulls of those appropriators, arranged delicately in a large oval creating a hairy portal on the wall. And where will it lead? What will it transform us into? Transmutation is occurring in this room–history transforming as it moves into the present. When you experience this magic, you will be stopped. It makes you take a step forward and then a step back. You want to lean in and look closer, turn away, and lean in again.
Recently diagnosed as neurodivergent, Cobra experiences the world differently. “A lot of what’s gotten me here,” the artist said, “is overanalyzing people's behavior, body language, textures, materials, and the way these things make me feel. That’s driven me crazy for a long time, and it’s naturally worked its way into the way I’ve made sculptures.”
The detail is astounding. Using silicone, Cobra recreates white flesh. Then, using a tattoo gun, delicately colors and adds pigment to the skin to make it look even more realistic. The work looks so real, it is often jarring. Seen in the shape of a smallpox sore, the tint of a tumor, the subtle pigments of red, pink, and orange that tinge a sliver of flesh placed in a deli slicer, the carefully inlaid rubies making up the heart of a wound, the intricate contents of a shark’s belly, decorated with shells, pearls, and a Black person's foot.
“It's to attract people to the work,” she says. “People really love shiny things. Even thinking about the gowns for the Met Gala, whatever bullshit thing is going on, all the beading and the sequins. I'm approaching my work with the same obsessiveness of making it look like it’s glittering. I usually end up incorporating that because diseases are disgusting. If you see raw images of syphilis, you're not really going to spend a lot of time there, but if some of those open sores are glass beads, it makes it a little bit easier for people to want to stick around it. You can't do too much because then you're overworking it. It’s the thought process of a painter applied to the physical process of making a sculpture.”
The detail never ceases to amaze. You can imagine Cobra’s hand carefully taking human hair, silicone, and fabric and weaving it together with a felting tool. Her art features disease, rotting flesh, cutting, pain, the suggestion of violence, and often the suggestion of revenge. Have I mentioned that the work is funny as hell too? There’s a deep trickster spirit enmeshed in the sculptures, giggling as it pokes at your sensitivities, winking as it pushes your boundaries. All a reflection of the artist’s sense of humor.
“Yeah, I've been trying to switch it up!” Cobra declares, smiling at me as we walk around her exhibit–the picture of warmth and humility, even as we stand in front of her completely grand and dramatic sculptures, a gaping mouth with barbed wire teeth, a full-sized shark created from white flesh, harkening back to the slave ships which brought out ancestors across the Atlantic.
“A lot of my work in the past was just about trauma that Black people have experienced through the medical industry. Now it's more so focused on the hands that created the trauma, and whiteness and the disease. There's a lot of hypocrisy in the assimilation tactics that people who are not white are supposed to aspire to–a lot of myths that clash against each other, whiteness is projected to the public as being a symbol of purity. But, you know, when you're thinking about colonization and the transatlantic slave trade, all the diseases that were brought over to Africa and to America were spread from Europeans. And a lot of those different scenarios that are, you know, pretty absurd. So I'm trying to present them in a way that still sticks to my material language, but is a little bit less about the history lesson of trauma. I think about different movies that I've seen, a lot of the silly serial killer movies. Deranged murders. But in a joker way!” Clown faces hang above cream pies but there’s glass hidden in those pies, a reflection of the intensity in her jokes. “There was one moment where I was really trying to harness some villain energy. I'm letting that go right now. I'm in my soft boy era.”
Though it may seem like a contradiction to say, Cobra’s enemy is not of the flesh. Though flesh is her medium, there are non-physical entities she is fighting and others she is collaborating with. Her work speaks to ancestral magic, historical slave revolts, people rising up and finding the way to liberation–but also to the people who never had the chance to rise up in the first place. So many of our Black, brown, and queer ancestors were not able to break free from the oppression of their time. This is where Cobra comes in. Reaching back through history, she does a service for the dead and lets them speak through her, remembering those Black artists who were not able to be artists in their own time.
“I think about all the artists that weren't able to produce work because they were enslaved,” she said. “I like the idea that when I'm doing my meditations, that it provides an opportunity for those people to be able to work through me, kind of brainstorm ideas through me, through meditation and science and prayer. The way that art is experienced now is totally different than it was before. So I like the idea that they have a larger audience for the sculptures that they want to collaborate with me on.”
Giving the dead avenues to create connects deeply to Cobra’s larger mission. In her burgeoning work with Black healing communities, and her widely recognized tattoo artistry, Cobra is a creature of care. Part of that growth and healing is reckoning with the past and asking the question of how American traditions of oppression affect us today. Talking about this pain and trauma, past and present, can be a revolutionary act for a Black artist. At a moment when so many of her contemporaries are interested in and encouraged to make work about Black joy, Cobra’s work strikes a different chord.
“I do feel like it is difficult because a lot of us are so used to keeping our trauma secret, in fear of exposing the vulnerability of ourselves or the people that have harmed us, still wanting to protect them subconsciously. We can also be fearful of what people that don't look like you do with your experiences of trauma. So in that regard, there's definitely a lot of suspicion that is valid. But at the same time, if you never address it or if you continue to try to bury it, it doesn't really help to change anything.”
There is something about the word “change” that resonates strongly in Cobra’s work. She enters her cave to commune and create, then re-emerges with gifts for the communities she exists in, changing all who come into contact with them. A week after seeing her exhibit I give my friend Hue (one of her tribe and close collaborators) a hug and look at his large chest piece, tattooed by Cobra over the last year. A few days later my friend Charles pulls his shorts up his thigh in a club and shows me a piece that covers his leg from hip to kneecap, another of the artist’s works connected to me through friendship. Cobra is a connector of community, and though she may have exited her sculpting seclusion, she continues to care for the flesh of her people. Flesh transformed by her–and more than flesh as well.