Cooper’s drawings on paper are built up through the repetitive act of mark making to suggest a phantom, imagined microscopy at various degrees of magnification. These color drawings can seem at odds with the massive snaking installation, a stark black-on-white volume taking over the space. Here, the homophone also operates as a metaphor for the spatial, formal, and pictorial relationship between the installation and the drawings. Cooper immerses his audience in the “mental gymnastics” of creating meaning from the seemingly unconnected title Board, the installation Ooze and drawings Fields in the exhibition space. As described by the artist, “Ooze can be read as a 3-dimensional companion to the drawings, but a feisty one, complimenting and opposing in equal fashion. Ooze serves as a direct formal link to the visual action at work on paper. But this formal train is derailed soon enough, as the color has been drained from the sculptures as if sections of Fields attained volume and promptly died, leaving behind their skeletal remains.”
Zany, offbeat, bizarre, every possible adjective to describe the non-normative has been assigned to the impossible to categorize work of Justin Cooper, and yet his materials could not be more mundane. Cooper’s spirited, performative intervention in the use of everyday materials reassigns these goods to props in his frenetic performances and drawings in both two and three dimensions. Once again, Justin Cooper utilizes the moniquemeloche gallery space to undertake spontaneous forms of serious play.
