COOPER COLE is pleased to announce Static & Scrim, our first exhibition of 2013.

This group show features seven New York based artists who share an interest in explorations of materiality and unique experimentations of media. Each of these artists exploit action, chance, and observation to create a variety of visceral results. The exhibition is a contemporary meditation on traditional strategies of abstraction, landscape, and figuration using hybrids of photography, printmaking, painting, and sculpture. Taken together, these pictures and objects create an environment that highlights underpinning concerns of a culture that requires hyper-receptive focus.

Glen Baldridge reveals a street-level Sunset by applying a layer of perforated vinyl to the windows and facade of the gallery. Like a luminous skin, the mural evokes an internal energy source, a self-perpetuating resource, and the possibility of an unacheiveable miraculous moment.

Colby Bird’s photographs also maintain a tension between interior and exterior spaces. The stilted nature of Bird’s images force the viewer to consider the creation of the photograph, and to place the focus not only on the photo itself but also consider the view of the photographer and the space beyond the plane of the photo. His framing devices remove the pictures from the wall into the room as free-standing objects.

Started with an enlarged photograph of an quotidian oil slick, David Kennedy Cutler’s Hollow Ground results in a futuristic, fragmented totem erected in the gallery. His sculptures are reactions to his working environment, a remote industrial neighborhood in Brooklyn, where pollution and environmental catastrophe confront the influx of a streamlined gentrification producing an aesthetic muddle. Kennedy Cutler calls attention to breakages and ruptures of order, geometry, structure, displaced geology, and dislocated cultural artifacts.

Sara Greenberger Rafferty also converts her photographs into standing sculptures, as steel infrastructures are wrapped in saturated figurative imagery. Greenberger Rafferty’s blurred and blotted performers, literally enact “stand-up” to display her myriad sources of inspiration, including such disparate linkages between performance, feminism, comedy, accidental formalisms, and spontaneous color eruptions.

Ryan Wallace’s uses the color spectrum and light as a notion of time and measurement in his work. His Tablet (Slow Measurement) resembles an X-ray of a painting as much as abstract painting itself. Wallace conjures the Shroud of Turin (albeit, in this case, a shroud of the substrate of the painting itself) as much as the monochromes of abstract painting.

Sam Moyer examines the liminal space between the two-and three-dimensional in paintings that hover on the edge of sculpture. Like Wallace, Moyer recalls the rigorous language of mid-20th-century minimalist art, but also the modest, playful and scattershot material processes of home decorative-arts projects.

This casual nod is further enhanced in Patrick Brennan’s reflective mylar and interference coated Cold Satellites/. Brennan employs these common materials and seemingly casual approach to disguise the sophistication of carefully pondered decisions. Brennan’s “kitsch-craft” materials, color choices, and openness to experimentation combine to create paintings that are remarkably original.

For additional information please contact the gallery:

info@coopercolegallery.com
+1.416.531.8000