In addition to Duane Flatmo, The Epitome Gallery is proud to be displaying the work of Scott Cocking for the month of May. Scott Cocking’s “Side Show” displays Scott’s whimsical and methodically serious approach to creating. We asked Scott to help our viewers better get to know him and his process and he had this to say.

Originally from San Diego, I took a graphic arts class in high school that involved silkscreen and print making. From there I went to college to get a degree in Graphic Design and worked at a T-shirt shop through school. When I graduated, I landed a job at Jack-in-the-Box Restaurants in the Art Department. I beat out 150+ other applicants because of my silkscreen knowledge. I worked there for 10 years and then moved to Humboldt in 2003 to start my own Graphics business: Side Show Design. Get it? I used to work for a clown.

I met Duane Flatmo shortly after moving to Humboldt and joined his mural class  and was introduced to the Kinetic Lab. While I was working for Blackjack Humboldt printing t-shirts (Gotta love the silkscreen world!) I was able to get work with tons of local businesses, including most of the breweries. I’m usually behind the scenes, putting things together and making other peoples art look amazing when it’s reproduced commercially.

Meanwhile, as a founding member of the Department of Spontaneous Combustion (The DSC) I have built loads of fire effect art pieces, bicycles, sculptures and fire props for performances. I have consulted on many fire features for local Kinetic teams and built the "fire flower" that is on the Arcata Plaza in front of Café BRIO. Combining skills from the DSC and the Kinetic Lab, Ken Beidleman, and I built a 4-seater, aluminum skinned tank-duck that shot fire 25 feet out of the top of its head. It was an art BIKE project for a client to take to Burning Man. As a co-producer of INFERKNOW Productions back in the day, there are many of my burn barrel sculptures donated to the property known as Area 74. They were built by me for fun and left after the events as a gift to Doug, the property owner.

I still like to make stuff out of junk I find and the actual assembly is fun for me. Having a graphic design background, I feel like redundant detail tasks are not that big of a deal and keep me engaged. Enter fuse beads and creating art with my son. That is where the skull in this art project started. I realized I could make “fake” fuse beads in Adobe Illustrator  for easy color swapping. Once I had the basic design down, I was able to make different color iterations, produce stickers, laser paths for cutting materials, all kinds of other ideas. Still, it's real work and hours to mess with the robots and fun to manipulate things into different media.

Still in the fun zone of art... I’ve made hundreds of stickers and joke "tickets" cards for Burning Man trouble making. Coming up with pranks and executing with real printing is pretty satisfying. I’ve made laminates that look more real than the real laminates and special passes that look more legit than a ticket you buy from Ticketmaster. Part of the beauty of being a Graphic Designer, who actually produces real world materials, is it’s easy to make fake stuff look really real, because it is. That’s part of the great joke.

The art in this show is a slice of fun things I like to make, Enjoy.

~ ScottyC aka SKIZ