Diana Cooper: Selected Works

Overview

Sometimes referred to as "parapaintings", Diana Cooper's works cannot be easily categorized Or associated with any singular medium. The artist engages in a unique practice that combintl§ drawing, painting, sculpture and installation. Although essentially abstract, these works suggest a narrative of cause and effect in which apparent chaos and randomness turns orderly. Cooper's elaborate three dimensional constructions convey a precarious balance between fragility and permanence. She creates quasi architectural pieces and three dimensional paintings and drawings from unorthodox materials such as foam core, felt, vinyl, post-its, porn porns, velcro, neopren nd photographs. Incorporating her own photographs is a recent development inspired in part by lR~ elaborate instruction manuals that Cooper has been making since 1998 to accompany her installational works. Among the works in the show, Speedway, 2000-2002, is Cooper's 1]10st architectural piece to date. It is a free-standing, large octagonal structure, part racetrack, Bart abstract architectural dwelling. Its sculpted parts and painted surfaces invite the viewer to Inhabit it mentally. Speedway explores the tension between facade and interior space collabsing conventional distinctions between what is in and what is out, what is front and what is back.

Cooper creates visual hybrids, paradoxical, yet logical structures that defy the familiar languages of formalism and abstraction. In her work, there is an underlying tension between the appearance of logical systems and the manner in which they are made. The work's unabashedly handmade nature humanises the represented structures and their interconnected parts. Cooper exposes and explores the pathos, the humour and the wonder of the constructed systems we live in, whether they be mass produced or handmade.

PL


"Recently I was trying to get some information over the phone. My call was answered by a machinE! and before long I was transported into a labyrinth of disembodied computer voices. As I progressed through the prompts the information I was seeking became more and more elusive until I finally hung up. This type of experience is becoming an increasingly familiar part of my everyday life.

In these technologically mediated experiences there is a precarious balance between necessity/excess, comprehension/obfuscation and comfort/alienation. I try to incorporate some of these paradoxical relationships in my art work.

The idea of a system or a collection of intertwined or competing systems permeates the work. But none of the systems replicate the real world. Instead they are imaginary. They are visual hybrids that combine elements of painting, drawing and sculpture. These elements often interact awkwardly and recall a construction site encircling an unfinished building or a 'jetway' gripping an aeroplane. The juxtaposition of awkward three dimensional constructions and delicate drawings also serves to communicate psychological content, feelings of vulnerability, frustration, boredom, exhilaration, and humour are among the emotions released. I want the work to embody these discrete aspects as the fragile elements of construction, as part of the vitality of the process of fabrication; and I want that condition of frailty to be implicit and inescapable, like an ice cream cake in the sun."