Diana Cooper

Diana Cooper - Mechanical Cloud 2004-05 [plastic, photo, paper, foam core, acetate, vinyl, felt, neopreme foam, Velcro, map pins]

“Sometimes I feel as though I am making flowcharts for an imaginary world.”

Her mind is like a filter constantly translating the world around her. Everything catches her eye: bright orange traffic cones meandering between the street and the sidewalk; an enormous building sheathed in black mesh from top to bottom; duct tape adhering a handwritten sign to a newly polished subway tiled wall. These are all urban works in progress, part of the transitory, the ephemeral, and the makeshift. These are the environments we inhabit everyday.

Diana Cooper - Orange Alert: USA 2005 [Acrylic, neoprene, acetate, felt, paper, coniugated plastic, map pins]

The act of mediating different worlds and creating unexpected juxtapositions is important to her. She transforms materials and insinuate them into unlikely contexts. She also creates the sense that they don’t quite belong but at the same time that they do. Often she likes to make something be what it shouldn’t be: scotch tape holds up a felt construction, plastic and pipe cleaners frame a heap of pom poms or a delicate felt-tip marker doodle covers an enormous canvas.

Diana Cooper - The Emerger: The Whitney Museum of Art at Altria, 2005 - Ongoing [Acrylic, ink, acetate, felt, paper, foam core, map pins]

She wants her work to provoke questions: how are limits determined (inside vs. outside)? How are values assigned (back vs. front)? What determines what a painting,  drawing and sculpture.

Diana Cooper - Museum of Contemporary Art, Cleveland, All Our Wandering, 2007 [wood, vynil, pigment print, ink, acrylic, colored pencil, ball point pen, velcro, foam rubber, and felt]

She is also interested in how you can start with a logical system and through sheer repetition and excess create something that unravels and stops making sense. In her work, systems overlap, compete and contradict one another. She wants to expose the proximity of order to chaos and show how these two realms bump up against one another. Digital, biological and medical systems are our life support systems but they can fail us too. In their complexity they become unstable and sometimes quite fragile. Fragility is important to her because it underscores our own vulnerability. Like the makeshift improvisations on existing systems she works is fragile and grows organically. It depicts elaborate networks that suggest mysterious functions and unnamable machines.

Diana Cooper - Swarm, 2003-2007 [comugated plastic, paper, ink, acrylic, felt, foam core, photos, veltro and map pins, dimension variable]

When experiencing her work she wants the viewer to become aware of their own body, their own frailty and strength, for them to become sensitive.

Diana Cooper - Hidden Tracks Sabotage the Random 2001-2002 [Vinyl, foam core, acetate, poms poms and paper on wall and floor]

The viewer needs to walk between things, stand on their tiptoes or bend down in order to see the work fully. She wants the viewing experience to be physical, visual and conceptual all at once. She wants the work to be both vital and vulnerable, like an ice cream cake in the sun.