JUSTIN COOPER

Justin Cooper is an artist and performer living and working in Catskill, Kingston, Brooklyn NY. 

Lines: The ways they delineate, create thresholds and cause thin spaces where things can exist and be indefinable for a brief moment before crossing over. My work is located in these liminal spaces and positions, dangling precariously between the hinged and unhinged. A relentless cross-pollination of media within my practice marks a restless search for these lines in both formal and conceptual manifestations. Whether drawn, spoken, or objectified, the lines I seek contain an energy that is both earnest and utterly deadpan. Mundane materials carve out a straight-faced existence alongside notions of the sublime, both simultaneously celebrating and cancelling out the other. Here an outpouring of abstract images and wholly recognizable objects are repositioned and subverted as unconscious signs to form a blurred language where unchained signifiers playfully resist coherent translation. I seek these unstable relationships that hover between the comedic and the disturbing according to circumstance. There is a chameleon approach to my work wherein objects, gestures, drawings, images, and videos are defamiliarized, looking to a self-contained context for definition. I am fascinated by incongruent moves that cause a mental misfire, a visual glitch, or a double-take and seek to visually and conceptually represent the spark that is created in these situations. But ultimately any apparent separation between poles is merely part of a wider unity, a nexus whose ultimate distillation is a simple line.