Justin Cooper: Wallpapering the Infinite

Wallpapering the Infinite at Monique Meloche Gallery is Justin Cooper’s cleanest show to date. In place of the giant, spatial scribble of garden hose or PVC piping of past installations, there are five four-foot hoses standing erect like green exclamation points. Where Cooper’s earlier drawings tried to escape off the walls, hanging studio-style from binder clips, the seven drawings here are contained behind glazing in nondescript frames that fade into the walls of the white cube gallery. In this seeming shift toward simplicity, Cooper co-opts the slick aesthetic of design showrooms. His Garden Hose Chandelier and Hose Log Lamps pointedly blur the line between formal sculpture, surreal fetish, and designed domestic furnishing. His large-scale drawings evoke wallpaper, and the AstroTurf on the floor completes the image: a “rug” that ties the room together. However, despite the finished, balanced and controlled face of the exhibition, a closer look at the work reveals a deeper, nagging breakdown.

The phenomenon of a structure collapsing on itself, which was present in Cooper’s past messy installations and intricate performances, is more clearly distilled in his new drawings. With pen, marker, colored pencil, and graphite, he lays out a complex system of interrelated lines, shapes, and colors. As he repeats the neural-like network over and over, small unintentional irregularities in the artist’s marks create ripples throughout the drawings, particularly in Spreadsheet 2 and Index. The effect of these many slight variations is magnified in a completed drawing, causing the overall composition to veer off course. Revealing his improv performance roots, Cooper believes that nothing is a mistake and refrains from judgment or correction. He simply continues, comparing the process to how mutations drive evolution over time.

Cooper’s earlier drawings read like sketches or ephemeral props, but the large-scale drawings in Wallpapering the Infinite stand on their own. They follow a predetermined logic, and half joking, Cooper likens them to the instruction-based conceptual wall drawings of Sol LeWitt—if they were executed by drunk scab workers. But Cooper isn’t sloppy. His drawings are extremely labor-intensive, taking up to three months to complete. The process can be tedious, even tortuous, but Cooper thrives on the discipline needed to fully commit to the concept. This tightly focused energy serves as a counterweight to the more frenetic and improvised aspects of his practice, yet even within these drawings (and within the whole exhibition), imperfections persist in a form of controlled chaos.

Cooper’s Hose Log Lamps read like three-dimensional versions of his drawings. The repetition of patterns, shapes, and colors—stubby brown cylinder + thin green line + glowing white sphere—references machine-made design and the detachment of Minimalism, but minor deviations again underscore a human touch. Each log has a unique shape; each hose has its own crooked lean. Descended from Hose Log sculptures the artist has been making since 2005, these new sculptures are more uniform in composition and scale, but still generate the ever uncanny effect of a gravity-defying garden hose growing out of a tree stump, now augmented by a mystical glowing orb atop the hose nozzle.

The title Wallpapering the Infinite conjures the image of eternal weekend warriors climbing up and down ladders, installing patterned paper on the walls of endless suburban tract homes. At once, it encompasses interior decorating and the sublime, the stuff of the everyday and the surreal. Conflating a mundane human activity with an abstract physical impossibility, it is an apt expression of the many pushing and pulling forces in Justin Cooper’s work. What is the line between order and chaos, the real and the unconscious, the comedic and the disturbing? Cooper’s physical representation of systems collapsing suggests that something is awry. His amplified glitches scratch at the veneer of perfection that mass-produced commodities and cookie-cutter suburban living purport to offer. The lawn is growing up the wall, and it has teeth.

This essay was informed by a Skype interview with the artist on April 1, 2016.