DIANA COOPER: Sightings

About

Whenever we open our eyes, we see.  But we don’t always observe.  Observation is a form of attentiveness, a way of focusing on objects and parsing out their permutations in or out of the present context. Admired for her playful drawings and mixed media installations that riff off of technological and information systems, in this show Cooper explores the subtle interplay of observer and observed.  In constructions, painting, and video she disorients the viewer by combining and recombining images in uncanny ways that render them both abstract and expressive.  It seems she is drawing with fragments of our own unexplored visual experience.  Security cameras stare at us, pleading; pom poms begin forming their own hive; enormous folding rulers burst from the wall, threatening; an elevator ride is transformed into a trippy reverie of the beyond; mirrors bring us into the maelstrom of images, exposing our gaze.  The viewer emerges into a world suddenly reenchanted.