Alika Cooper, 'Magic mountain', gouache on paper, 24 x 24 in.
'Tippi', gouache on paper, 15 x 12 in.
'Memorial', oil on canvas, 24 x 24 in.
'Tippi', oil on canvas, 16 x 16 in.
For her first solo show, Oakland-based artist Alika Cooper (whose illustrations you may have seen while flipping through The New York Times Sunday Magazine) approaches two very local sort of 'sunshine noir' icons - Golden Era Hollywood starlets and the often poor rural landscape of Southern California - with an ironic nostalgia that borders on family love, a sort of grotesque, but inevitable, warmth.
The new paintings and works on paper deal with two traditionally unconnected kinds of subject matter, but the viewer soon becomes privy to the discrete, but not totally silent, conversation going on here, a strange symmetry between two ideas of cultural abandonment that end up subverting and defining each other - the suburban dereliction of the deserted trailer park, left as if to fade in the sun, and the eroded, abjected representation of a former age's imagery of beauty, a slight slap in the face of commercially perfect, hyperglamourised femininity as edited and altered by Cooper's unassuming but powerfully wielded gouache paints. The stars in Cooper's psychologically charged cameos don't always resemble their real-life counterparts (eg the many faceted versions of Tippi, Jane, Anne); the range of verisimilitude within the series is slightly inconsistent, but this is probably part of the point, to distort in unexpected, inexplicable ways.
In fact, it was precisely the artist's ability to abstract such well-known figures and chosen moments that struck me most upon a first look: you end up forgetting who you're looking for, and end up just looking as if at clues of strangers, and of strangeness, like you might when facing the simplified, fluid strokes in the rich in unconscious memories, highly symbolic work of Norbert Schwontkowski. Famous faces break up into restless eyes, simplified into the shadowy silhouette of a cheekbone, people frozen not just in their film-still expressions, but emotionally as well.
It's not hard to be drawn to this gallery of troubled faces, magnetically rendered images of sex-symbols turned into splotches of line and shadow as if placed under the metaphorical faucet of time, as if submerged and sinking. In this version of ugliness, I think a narrative of anonymity and isolation plays the key role - the step just before the formlessness of complete disappearance, whether it be of an embarrassingly, fearsomely non-distinct backyard scenario or a face dissolving into the light and darkness of the spotlight that defined it.
Lupe Nunez-Fernandez
ALIKA COOPER
To 30 Aug 2007
Mark Wolfe Contemporary Art
49 Geary Street, Suite 202
San Francisco, California 94108
Alika Cooper's site
)
)
)