HALSEY MCKAY GALLERY

OCTOBER 3 – NOVEMBER 15, 2015 | Opening reception: 6 – 8 pm, Saturday, October 3

Ian Cooper’s first solo exhibition at Halsey McKay presents five mixed-media sculptures that toy with themes of self-reflexivity, mirroring, retraction, and disembodiment via nuanced material translation and implied use potential.  The show’s title toggles between darkly negative options, while playfully resisting a binary definition.

Off/Off (Double Barre), 2015 flips and dramatizes the image of an inactive learning space.  Two wall-hung, waxed canvas panels allow for spectral ballet barres to protrude. Like handwriting practice templates, these four parallel lines offer themselves as training wheels (for possible and impossibly oriented bodies) while doubling as bodily limbs themselves.  The canvas panels translate hard, reflective surfaces into ones soft, dark and absorptive. Upon closer inspection, the chalk-white barres reveal quixotic, intermittent carvings – minor transgressions that evoke the undersides of grade school surfaces or stick-and-poke tattoos, and suggest both personal narrative and timelessness.

Bow/Tie, 2015 bridges the wall and floor via a large-scale fabricated hinge.  Presented in its ‘open’ position, this hybrid tied bow and bow-tie is a mechanical representation of self-reflexivity. Further demarcated by a drawn “spotlight,” the sculpture allows for material – and identity – transformation, as elements fall outside these liminal lines. Timeline (Centrefold), 2015 also features fabricated dowel hinges, here replacing paper folds with a mechanism intended for heavy usage.  Both Bow/Tie and Centrefold are constructed from MDF and plywood, and only primed, not painted.  Light absorbing and sanded until “hand-smooth,” their smoothness becomes image, and the idea of being touched takes center stage.

Screening (Matador), 2015 and Timeline (Finish Him), 2015 both incorporate quilted fabric elements as translations of an institutional projector screen and the severe metal of a guillotine blade, respectively. Cylindrical housings allow for these panels to pour out of them, and imply durability and retractability – repeated usage extending into the past and future.  Both works incorporate negative space as stand-ins for the bodies they imply.  A penetrated matador’s cape and a cache of broken finish line tape declare impending finality, or perhaps a retraction.  Roll it up, fold it up, take it away.

Cooper has had solo exhibitions at Sandroni.Rey, Los Angeles; and CUE Arts Foundation, New York. His work has been exhibited both in the United States and abroad at such galleries and institutions as Artist Curated Projects, Los Angeles; Planthouse, New York; Tracy Williams, LTD, New York; Klaus von Nichtssagend, New York; Nice & Fit, Berlin; Mai 36 Galerie, Zurich; Locust Projects, Miami; The Contemporary Art Center, Cincinnati; and The Schirn Kunsthalle, Frankfurt.  Cooper’s work is in the permanent collection of The Whitney Museum of American Art and The Perez Art Museum in Miami.

Ian Cooper was born in New York City in 1978, and now lives and works in Red Hook, Brooklyn.  He is currently an MFA candidate at Bard College and is on the sculpture faculty at New York University.