RECENT WORK
(from left to right)
- Balancing Act, 2024
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Weapon #1, 2025
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Eclipsing, 2024
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Untitled (BLCP), 2025
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Untitled (BLCP), 2025
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Untitled (BLCP), 2025
- Landline, 2025
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Plant Based Industrial Complex, 2025
- Plant Based Industrial Complex (detail), 2025
GARBAGE TOUR (2019-ONGOING)
Garbage Tour is an ongoing experiential site-based research project that incorporates a hybrid social practice component. Guided by Lucas Cook and Natalie Hayes the recurring unauthorized tours aim to result in interdisciplinary making, and enlightenment within the banal. It takes place at and in the energy of Buffalo Lakeside Commerce Park, centered around the Union Ship Canal that feeds into Lake Erie, on the Westernmost edge of South Buffalo—a bygone “smart growth” park and brownfield redevelopment site which defies any typical or idyllic park utilization. Instead this half park, half commercial industrial complex most often hosts remarkable amounts of accumulated trash due to various coinciding factors. Spread throughout the park are unintentional monuments, relics and artifacts embedded into the physical landscape signalling back to its historic past as once an essential site in the process of local steelmanufacturing.
One can occasionally encounter a transient dogwalker, biker, or fisher, but most often one will find oneself alone. Along with parking spot picnics, harmless illicit activities, and the rare recreation, the park has become a popular spot for illegal dumping of household and/or industrial objects. Collaborating with some serious municipal neglect and careless visitors—litter from car-bound guests, overflowing public trash cans, or debris blown in via the nearby highway make this park a public cesspool and/or a treasure trove for all types of junk.
Garbage Tour consists of guided tours of the area during which visitors can choose to collect and respond to/with the garbage that most compels them; the peak harvest season is anywhere from late February to mid-April, when the terrain is flattened from snow and refuse is made more visible/accessible. Garbage Tour intends to bring Buffalo Lakeside Commerce Park into the light, including and with emphasis on all of its accumulated trash; it is a long-term, tactile study of the park’s industrial history, interminable development, and implicit mystery.
“The symbols of the divine initially show up at the trash stratum.” - PKD
TRASH STRATA (2023)
Trash Strata is a series of offerings from Lucas Cook and Natalie Hayes manifested by way of material mimicry, lottery, junk, and kitsch. This exhibition was born at/around Buffalo Lakeside Commerce Park in the form of an ongoing collaborative practice of refuse collection and connection; upon finding a severely underappreciated site with a propensity for accumulating impressive quantities of garbage, an impulse to accumulate and conglomerate arose. Trash Strata, in general, intends to articulate and distribute the unique energetic qualities of that site and, in this particular iteration, intends to zoom in and out of a generalized though highly recognizable American landscape, revealing its industrial history, interminable development, and implicit mystery. This work is, at its core, a visceral response to a high saturation of supposed uselessness at an imagined intersection of mystique and bureaucracy. In short, it is an argument in favor of the possibility of enchantment at Buffalo Lakeside Commerce Park despite its banality and filth and, furthermore, the possibility of enchantment in all banality and filth.
@ Buffalo Institute for Contemporary Art, Project Space
installation images courtesy of Nando Alvarez-Perez
ANTI-FILTER, 2021
testing the limitations of the integrated AI facial recognition “filters” from the four main social media platforms via abstracted face modification.
the fifth photo in each row represents that point at which the filters would no longer register to the face.
in collaboration with natalie hayes
Lucas Cook (b. 1998) employs nonlinear methodologies to reason with the local and the automated present.
Education
2021 BFA, Photography Concentration, Magna Cum Laude, University at Buffalo
2022 - present BICA School
Solo and Two Person Exhibitons
2025 Choiceball, The Changing Scene at The Flow Chart Foundation, Hudson, NY
2023 Trash Strata, BICA Project Space, Buffalo, NY
There, There, BICA School, Buffalo, NY
2021 Accumulator, CFA Project Space, Buffalo, NY
Rendering, CFA Project Space, Buffalo, NY
Group Exhibitions
2025 Do not go out of the door, Buffalo Institute for Contemporary Art, Buffalo, NY
Nocturama, BICA Project Space, Buffalo, NY
Heathscapes, BICA Project Space, Buffalo, NY
2024 Kindred, Raft of Sanity, Buffalo, NY
Club Heat, The Temp, Buffalo, NY
BICA School Biennial, BICA Project Space, Buffalo, NY
2023 Wolf - In Erie County, Hallwalls, Buffalo, NY
2021 Evelyn Rumsey Lord Fund Grantee Exhibition, CFA Project Space, University at Buffalo
2020 Evelyn Rumsey Lord Fund Exhibition, UB CFA Gallery, University at Buffalo
Honors/Awards
2021 William E. Townsend Photography Scholarship Fund
2020 Evelyn Rumsey Lord Fund Award from the University at Buffalo Department of Art
Articles
2025 Kyla Kegler, “Utopia vs. the Apocalypse in a Post-Market Art Economy,” Cornelia Magazine