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511 GALLERY is pleased to present Jacks Are Wild, a solo exhibition of the sculptures and paintings of Boston-based artist Mark Cooper.
Cooper's work is large - both the anomalous floor-based sculptures and the mixed media works on canvas - and is focused on the structure inherent and underlying all forms. In The Virus and The Cure, Cooper constructed two enormous metaphors from wooden skeletal frames, each approximately seven feet long, which are then covered with canvas tautly wrapped, then painted on polymer resin overskins. The seemingly random shapes-- multi-hued but differing in overall primary color-actually can be fitted together. Installed on the floor in this exhibition, they appear as two closely- related but distinctly separate, unknown "bodies" engaged in a single rhythmic dance.
In much of this new work, Cooper relates one shape to another but also to the sum of its parts, resulting in a setting of strange but easily accessible forms that seem to be components of a larger unearthly environment. The signature sculptural pieces in Jacks Are Wild reference the structure and imagery of jacks, the childhood floor game played with a ball and usually ten jacks. In Cooper's varying "jacks", the inherent structure has taken off and "gone wild", pushing out colored appendages until entirely new "jacks-like" shapes are realized.
The mixed media paintings in the show, which combine patterns, paper, rice paper, India ink, acrylic, Ronan's sign paint, and polyurethane in uneven and shifting layers on the canvas, address issues of cultural and political import as well as the role of gesture and mark-making in modernist and contemporary art practice.
