Prismatic Shifts
Installation View
Lee Boroson & Diana Cooper
February 22th-March 31, 2017
Ildiko Butler Gallery, Fordham University at Lincoln Center
Curated by Carleen Sheehan
PRISMATIC SHIFTS features site-specific works by internationally recognized artists Lee Boroson and Diana Cooper, working in collaborative engagement with both each other’s work and the space surrounding the gallery. Both artists were inspired by the physical space of the Butler Gallery itself, which, with it’s glassed-in front wall and small lense-like windows onto 60th Street, functions as both a vitrine to showcase work and as a prism that reflects and refracts the activities taking place outside it.
Both artists share an inclination for engaging and altering our perception of environments in simple yet innovative ways, and they have constructed artworks that connect visually to the architecture and activity of the Lowenstein lobby and the world outside, underscoring the fluidity of our perception of the built and natural worlds, and the ways we make connections and generate meaning through visual language.
The natural world is Lee Boroson’s primary subject, and, in particular, the way in which humans represent, imagine and interact with it. Boroson is interested in our experience of nature as cultured and cultivated, rather than traditional representations of the wild and unmanageable. His installations are both embodied and ephemeral; they transform material and experience within the space of the gallery, calling for viewers to contemplate the very nature of nature. For this exhibition he visually pulls references from the natural world into the gallery through the street-side window, and infuses familiar domestic forms with its radiant energy.
Boroson’s work was recently featured in a one-person exhibition at MASS MOCA in Williamstown, MA. Selected exhibitions also include The Frances Young Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery, Skidmore College, Saratoga Springs, New York, and the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York. Boroson lives and works in Brooklyn.
Diana Cooper creates visual hybrids of drawing, painting, sculpture, photography and, with this installation, video. Cooper’s elaborate installations feel like enormous three-dimensional drawings whose forms echo the meandering quality of a viewer’s movement and mind moving across a space. Her materials (felt tip marker, photographs, paper, polypropylene, corrugated plastic, pvc, metal hardware, acetate, ethylene vinyl acetate, acrylic rods, ink, map pins, acrylic paint, Velcro, Styrofoam, etc.) are transformed via aggregation, juxtaposition, and accumulation, re-orienting our perception of the world around us. Cooper created her first one-channel video presentation for this show, turning her eye for abstraction in the built environment to the visual and aural experience of the escalator banks across from the gallery in the Lowenstein Lobby.
Recent projects for Cooper include a large-scale mosaic mural commission from the New York City MTA for a site on Roosevelt Island, and a grand lobby mural commission at the Center for the Arts at Virginia Tech, part of their innovative series, DataStream: Exhibitions at the Intersection of Creativity, Arts and Technology. Diana Cooper lives and works in Brooklyn.
