COOPER COLE is pleased to present New Document, a group exhibition of the work of Moyra Davey, Nikita Gale, Timothy Yanick Hunter, Laurie Kang, and Paul Mpagi Sepuya.

This exhibition brings together conceptual photographic, sculptural, and sound-based works that meditate on subjectivity, reconfiguring how it has been regulated, archived, and categorized. In their respective practices, these artists take the linearity of historical narratives into question, asking who is speaking, who is listening, and whose voices intersect with the dominant narratives we have been taught.

New works by Timothy Yanick Hunter consider both digital and physical interpolations around image making, using forms of looping, rhythm, and repetition. Embracing disorientation and opacity, he poses questions about the familiar, and challenges viewers to imagine futures beyond our context. In a related dialogue, Moyra Davey’s work attempts to bridge unseen gaps between culture and lived experiences. Her works often possess visible creases and tape marks, after physically sending them through mail systems. She is interested in witnessing the flow and chance related to letting something go, and observing the results. Laurie Kang shares Davey’s interest in precarity, as her practice engages directly in the ‘misuse’ of photographic materials. In her series Molt, she suspends large, unfixed film from the ceilings, allowing them to tan continually over time. The context in which the film is exposed will leave impressions on the sensitive surface of the materials, like a body, telling atmospheric stories about their context.

The photographic works by Paul Mpagi Sepuya weave together the histories and possibilities within the discourse of portraiture. Taking into account issues of representation and refusal, his works incorporate the roles of the artist, sitter, viewer, and the photograph itself into his address, revealing how they relate to the complex history of studio photography. Nikita Gale also considers the presence and limitations of the body in the process of creating work. In her sound work Keynote Drift, a trumpet imitates car-related sounds, such as crashes, racing, and scenic drives. These sounds are punctuated by quick breaths between instrumental sounds, suggesting the presence of the body in these perceptual shifts between figure and ground.

Together, Hunter, Davey, Kang, Sepuya, and Gale employ distinctive approaches to diverse media in order to interject into, reshuffle, and reinterpret historical photography and archives, and their mass interpretations. These artists meticulously consider not only representation, but also the roles of audiences, reception, and lived experiences that are implicated into these relationships, speculating on alternative ways of understanding.

Moyra Davey (b. 1958 Toronto, Ontario, Canada) attended Concordia University before receiving a MFA degree from the University of California, San Diego in 1988, shortly after she enrolled in the Independent Study Program at the Whitney Museum of American Art. Her work has been exhibited at MUMOK in Vienna, the Whitney Biennial, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, and has received numerous awards, such as the 2010 The Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Award and the 2004 Anonymous Was a Woman award. Davey currently lives and works in New York, New York, USA.

Nikita Gale (b. 1983, Anchorage, Alaska, USA) received an MFA from University of California in 2016 and a BA from Yale University in 2006. Recent solo exhibitions have been held at LAXART, Los Angeles; 52 Walker, New York; Anchorage Museum; CIRCA in collaboration with Chisenhale Gallery, London; California African-American Museum, Los Angeles; MoMA PS1, New York; the Visual Arts Center, University of Texas at Austin; and Commonwealth and Council, Los Angeles. Selected group exhibitions have been held at Swiss Institute, NY; Nottingham Contemporary, UK; Moderna Museet, Stockholm; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; and the Studio Museum in Harlem, New York. Gale is the recipient of a FOCA Fellowship, a Rema Hort Mann Foundation Emerging Artist Grant, the Toby Devan Lewis Fellowship, and residencies at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, Fountainhead, the Atlanta Contemporary Art Center, Sculpture Center, and the Center for Photography at Woodstock. Gale currently lives and works in Los Angeles, California, USA.

Timothy Yanick Hunter (b. 1990 Toronto, Ontario, Canada) is a multidisciplinary artist and curator. Hunter received his BA from the University of Toronto, and has been artist in residence at the Art Gallery of Ontario and PADA Studios in Barreiro, Portugal. He will be included in the 2022 Rencontres de Bamako Biennale in Mali, is included in the 2022 Toronto Biennial of Art, and has exhibited at Gallery 44, Toronto (2021); A Space Gallery, Toronto (2020); 92Y, New York (2020); Art Gallery of Guelph, Guelph (2019) and PADA Studios, Barreiro (2019); among others. Hunter lives and works in Toronto, Ontario, Canada.

Laurie Kang (b. 1985 Toronto, Ontario, Canada) has exhibited at The New Museum, Sculpture Center, Helena Anrather, Interstate Projects, Cue Art Foundation, New York; Oakville Galleries, Oakville; The Power Plant, Franz Kaka, Cooper Cole, Gallery TPW, and Carl Louie, Toronto; Remai Modern, Saskatoon; Galerie Antoine Ertaskiran and Projet Pangée, Montreal; Raster Gallery, Warsaw; and Camera Austria, Graz. Artist residencies include Rupert, Vilnius; Tag Team, Bergen; The Banff Centre, Alberta; Triangle Studios and Interstate Projects, Brooklyn. In 2022, she will be the first artist in residence at Horizon Art Foundation in Los Angeles. She holds an MFA from the Milton Avery School of the Arts at Bard College. Kang lives and works in Toronto, Ontario, Canada.

Paul Mpagi Sepuya (b. 1982, San Bernardino, California, USA) earned an MFA in photography at UCLA in 2016 and a BFA from New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts in 2004. He was Artist-in-Residence at the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, the Center for Photography at Woodstock, The Studio Museum in Harlem and Fire Island Artist Residency, and a recipient of the 2019 Rauschenberg Residency. He is Acting Associate Professor in Media Arts at the University of California San Diego and has taught at CalArts and Bard MFA. Sepuya’s work is in the permanent collections of the LACMA, MOCA Los Angeles, the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Guggenheim Museum, the Getty Museum, the Studio Museum in Harlem, and the ICA Boston, among others. Solo museum exhibitions include the University of the Arts in Philadelphia, DOCUMENT, Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts, Fotomuseum Amsterdam, Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis and Blaffer Art Museum. Sepuya lives and works in Los Angeles, California, USA.