Diana Cooper at Postmasters - New York

The porous, pliant interface between two dimensions and three is where Diana Cooper's work takes shape, even when, as with the rollicking Speedway, a piece is freestanding. A De Stijlish foamcore dollhouse, Speedway is cut away on one side to show little chambers outfitted with toylike nested and stacked rectilinear forms and the odd roomful of colored pompoms (a Cooper trademark); wall treatments tend toward hallucinatory doodling. From the other side, Speedway is a Las Vegas marquee of pulsing concentric and parallel lines, punctuated by seedily alluring little niches.

In her recent show of 13 works from 2000-02, the raucously urban Speedway found a doppelganger in Push Gently, a spectral, hushed city plan made of low, blocky, white felt-covered forms. They are interspersed with photos of airplanes, cropped to show little more than gray, bladelike wings. Vaguely menacing, the photos bring shark fins to mind, but with its ghostly pallor, Push Gently also cautiously prods the tender 9/11 spot.

In the deft little Stellar Nurseries, Cooper riffs on the theme of visual display with miniature stylized pictures and frames and tiny numbers on pinheads (the kind used in museum vitrines). She's equally good at a more majestic scale, as in the tapestry-sized drawing-on-canvas Traveling the Exosphere, whose layered networks of crystals and clouds, dense but delicate, seem liable to drift into the atmosphere. Here, as in other drawings, little frames project from the drawing's surface, some empty and some screened with clear plastic; focusing with arch studiousness on particular graphic incidents, these "lenses" also hint, discomfortingly, that those features might stare right back. Clear plastic reappears as the dominant material in Hidden Tracks Sabotage the Random, a wall-to-floor space gobbler that sprouts a paranoid's dream-world of interconnected roadways and runways, control towers, circuit boards, little pom-pom-filled storage tanks and enough dotted lines to satisfy any armchair puzzler.

One line of descent in Cooper's work--when volume shrinks to line, then shadow--is traceable to Richard Tuttle. Another comes from Sol LeWitt, both early and recent; Cooper shares his inclination to take a line for a walk and get rather manically distracted. Peter Halley is relevant, too, particularly to Cooper's endorsing of abstraction's association with hidden orders of circulation (of people, vehicles, electricity and other forms of power). But there is nothing remotely tendentious about her work, which on the contrary often looks like it has been breathing helium: it's giddy, effortlessly elevated and full to bursting.

COPYRIGHT 2002 Brant Publications, Inc.
COPYRIGHT 2002 Gale Group