Bringing together a wide array of both recent and archival objects, the exhibition Stock Footage and Outtakes: A Selection of Works by Gronk offered a rare insight into the broad range of the elusive artist’s ever-evolving practice. Much like the recycled film elements (stock footage) and alternative cuts (outtakes) referenced in the exhibition title, the disparate works on display collectively highlighted the productive routines and thematic recurrences that assemble to form Gronk’s distinctive creative process. While the exhibition was largely focused on exploring his artistic output as illustrator and painter, Gronk’s well-known investment in the cinematic and the performative still managed to percolate to the surface; recognizable in the storyboard-like explorations of his daily drawings, in the tongue-in-cheek pastiche of ASCO’s famed No Movie Award, in the miniature maquette of his set design for Peter Sellars’ dramatic opera, Ainadamar, and, especially, in the massive papier-mâché sculpture inspired by his ongoing obsession with 1950’s monster movies like The Giant Claw.

Tormenta makes an appearance as well, of course - multiple appearances, in fact – casting shadow finger puppets in three large paintings and standing stoically in six colorful new panels. However, while she may have top billing (diva that she is), she was far from the only cast member listed on the call sheet. There was also a ten-foot tall red mayan dog, a giant cardboard tank inscribed with roaring dinosaurs, a floating head wearing actual cookies as earrings, and a bevy of wide-eyed faces glaring out from a collage of painted coffee cup sleeves!
 
In conjunction with the show, Gronk also transformed the Cerritos College Art Gallery’s Projects Space into his temporary studio while he worked on a new 32-foot long multi-panel painting commissioned by the Cerritos College Committee on Art in Public Spaces for the Fine Arts Building’s west hallway.