SUSAN COOPER

Art serves as a compass to determine and explore our place in the world. It is a fulcrum, linking the physical world with ideas, memory and vision.

Maintaining perspective in a vast and complicated world is my fascination in public works and gallery art. Our place in time and place in life are perpetually changing, producing more combinations of understanding and an ever enlarging vision of the world.

The best benefit of public art is learning about new areas and enlarging my perspective of the world. Public art addresses the nature of the site and its surroundings, This includes the purpose of the facility as well as its physical nature, and natural setting. In my studio work I concentrate on how I see the world privately. How time, and place in life changes my view is apparent in my work over the last 40 years.

Painting is my training but my art is almost always very high relief and free form sculpture in a variety of materials. I work in all formats, sizes, media, in both public and private arenas. Commissioned work is at the City and County Building in Denver where two 14 feet by 7 feet by 8 inches high relief murals flank the Rotunda. For four years I was on a design team for RTD, Regional Transportation District. I designed enhancements for 13 stations over 20 miles. My largest contribution was designing over forty windscreens, each in unique colors and patterns. A 100 foot wall sculpture recreating facades of synagogues that were destroyed during WWII is at the Los Angeles Museum of the Holocaust. Lucy R. Lippard wrote the catalogue essay for the synagogue project that was underwritten by the Gonda Foundation. My work has also appeared in ARTFORUM, Los Angeles Times, and quite often in Denver Newspapers.

Los Angeles is my original home. My art education began at California State University at Northridge and continued at University of California at Berkeley, where I earned BA and MA degrees. After two years in New Mexico where I had a painting grant and a painting commission, I settled Denver where I raised two children while I continued my artwork and occasionally taught art and colleges and universities. . I now live outside of Denver on a couple of quiet acres that I share with my husband and occasional wildlife visitors. My studio is a former horse barn. I live and love to work and the hours in the studio are almost always intellectually challenging and too terribly short.

Many of my public works are in universities, parks, hospitals, and various other locations in California, Colorado, Nebraska, Mexico, and Missouri. Other installations are at the Denver Art Museum, Kirkland Museum, Roswell Museum, and Anderson Museum of contemporary Art in New Mexico.

Preferred media are bronze, plastic, LED lighting, glass, steel, wood, oil paint and combinations of the above. I am often curious about the way media changes the facts of objects and their significance. For example, a series of works on the cycles of life began as prints, became wall sculptures, then plastic, and currently bronze. This reflects my continued fascination with how time and place alter the perspective on the same phenomena. A person is the same in nature while time and place changes that outward perspective and inner perception. The studio work often addresses evolution and the nature of art making itself.—

As an artist I have the honor of constantly reflecting the continually changing, perplexing, and marvelous world that we all occupy.

Susan Cooper understands well the role of architecture in the dreamlike process of memory because it has worked for her, or on her. Cooper’s work performs both a documentary and an esthetic function. Her reliefs are removed from reality – the buildings are out of context, floating in a new placer all their own, created by the artist. Relief – positioned between painting and sculpture – seems the right choice for the installation. Pushed forward from the passive picture plane, it is a liminal medium, between two and three dimensions, reflecting the liminal place of memory between part and present.

—Lucy R. Lippard

The works may be understood as constructions that use furniture as a vehicle to explore…the relationship between painting and sculpture. Cooper raises questions about the identity of painting and sculpture through a game of realities and illusion….Since this work is made of recognizable things whose usual shapes and forms are commonly known, the pictorial adjustments are also seen as distortions of reality. This strategy permits two ways of seeing and understanding simultaneously and gives the work a stake in the real, as well as in an imaginary, world.

—Howard Risatti

—Howard Risatti