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.
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