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Diana Cooper

Sometimes I feel as though I am making flowcharts for an imaginary world. My mind is like a filter constantly translating the world around me. Everything catches my 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.
The act of mediating different worlds and creating unexpected juxtapositions is important to me. I want to transform materials and insinuate them into unlikely contexts. I want to create the sense that they don’t quite belong but at the same time that they do. Often I like 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.

I want the work to provoke questions: how are limits determined (inside vs. outside)? How are values assigned (back vs. front)? What determines what a painting is? My own work would be impossible if I did not question the traditional categories of painting, drawing and sculpture.

I am 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 my work, systems overlap, compete and contradict one another. I want 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 me because it underscores our own vulnerability. Like the makeshift improvisations on existing systems my work is fragile and grows organically. It depicts elaborate networks that suggest mysterious functions and unnamable machines.

When experiencing my work I want the viewer to become aware of their own body, their own frailty and strength. I also want them to become sensitive to their desire to touch the work. At times the act of viewing itself becomes physically awkward or like a strange dance. The viewer needs to walk between things, stand on their tiptoes or bend down in order to see the work fully. I want the viewing experience to be physical, visual and conceptual all at once. I want the work to be both vital and vulnerable, like an ice cream cake in the sun.



Fun, 1999, felt tip marker, aluminum tape, acrylic on paper, 50x38x3.5 inches



Fun, (Detail), 1999, felt tip marker, aluminum tape, acrylic on paper, 50x38x3.5 inches

© 2007 Diana Cooper | Do not reproduce without permission.
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