Spectral Visions of Artist Transform Donskoj & Co
With the quadricentennial celebration of Henry Hudson’s 1609 voyage well underway, current cultural offerings in the area tend toward the topical. We Are History, an installation by Welsh artist Andrew Cooper on view through the end of this month at Donskoj & Co., N.Y. offers an alternative: an investigation of memory itself, conveyed in an assemblage of mysterious glowing images set adrift in a timeless, darkened space.
Swathed in black fabric, the upstairs gallery walls have vanished, replaced by the vacuum of outer space, or perhaps the deep recesses of a cave (Cooper comes from a family of coal miners). Blown-up negatives of old snapshots of the artist’s relatives have been printed on scrolls of fluorescent-painted acetate, which are suspended from the ceiling and dramatically illuminated by black lights placed along the floor. In effect, they form a kind of theater of memory, and the protagonists of long-ago moments—ordinary people, for the most part–have been resurrected as spectral superstars, flaunting their fashionable clothes and debonair poses as if strutting along a runway or caught by the paparazzi in the electric atmosphere of a nightclub. A closer look reveals bits of buildings, shrubbery, railings, the sea and other scenic fragments, clues to imaginary narratives.
A bush, for example, resembles a tumbleweed, and the viewer is transported to the plains of Kansas; a blurry, starkly lit landscape might be taken from an alien planet.
Cooper is no stranger to Kingston: his piece, The Outsider, was included in the 2005 Kingston Sculpture Biennial. In that work, a cast of a pair of legs was clamped to a wall, and one of the feet randomly tapped the floor. We Are History plays with the viewer’s perception and animates the art object in a different way. The visitor perambulates among the scrolls, which seem unnervingly alive; they flutter ever so slightly, as if they were the shades of the eerie personages depicted on their surfaces. With every step, the configuration of images changes in space: figures collide, form a crowd, drift apart, fade away into the distance. Murmuring voices, emitting from a digital player—they are recitations of letters home written by Welsh immigrants to America–heighten the sense of ghostly presence.
By altering the photographic images so that they are no longer fixed in time and space, Cooper has exposed layers of subterranean meaning and revealed their purely formal powers of expression. The device of using negatives has transformed faces smiling for the camera into leering, ghoulish visages. Details of fashion stand out–a man’s bowler
hat and overcoat, another gent’s wide tie and high-waisted trousers, the perms and patterned dresses of three women—suggesting archetypes of popular culture: the gangster, the dandy, the 1940s glamour girl. There’s a religious association as well, expressed in the ritualistic Sunday-best formality of the clothes, the stilted, frontal poses
of the figures, severe as Byzantine icons, and the background frames of light-filled doors and windows, portals to the afterlife.
“The idea behind this is that they’re like memories, because they’re overlaid images,” Cooper said. “They’re like stories that are transmitted and passed down, which get altered and changed. By the end, everyone’s gotten strange. We don’t talk about them anymore.”
Source: Lynn Woods – Kingston Times