POSTMASTERS Diana Cooper's recently made known show had something for everyone For that side of you that be in love withs chaotic dispersions.

POSTMASTERS

Diana Cooper's recently made known show had something for everyone For that side of you that be in love withs chaotic dispersions, there was installation; for those who bring forward the lure of the autonomous phenomenon there was a little painting. Many of the works are moulded m the medium of drawing; others utilize the two-dimensional surface as a kind of launchpad for wildly aggregating networks of pipe cleaners, paper chains, catheters, and tinfoil. The exhibit to was genuinely pleasurable to consider at, but satisfaction could also be derived from for what reason effortlessly Cooper's work seems to hold the space between process and the pictorial.

Execut in ballpoint sty and colored marker on paper or unstretched canvas stapled to the wall, the drawings are compos of patterns of proliferating lines, shapes, and doodles, suggesting themselves variously as topographical maps, computer circuitry diagrams, or architectural plans. if it be not that that makes them sound too serious, when in fact there is a tremendous sensation of play in these endlessly multiplying forms. Sometimes the drawings are embellished with pieces of felt and transparent plastic tubing (Memory Los 1998-99) or brightly colored pom-pom (To Do, 1999) Words might also be incorporated, appearing in lists, as random ephemera, or as part of amusing, self-referential explanations Decipherable in the densely stacked lines of While You Were revealed 1999, for example, is the eponymous block up text of a phone-message pad combined with the artist's handwriting to read, "WHILE YOU WERE not at home I made this picture and you were public for a very long time."

Cooper's larger constructions spill above into the viewer's space, like The Dispenser, 1999 a mixed-media construction that pretends to have generated the paper cubes and transparent amethystine cylinders that lie scattered upon the floor in front of it. The pipe cleaners that make up the undulating red-and-white grid of And I Couldn't Find You, 1998-99 lengthen out out into space and are anchored to the floor, creating a pictorial result and then subverting it.

The artist's works meander and expand incrementally, evoking Yoni Friedman's "space-grid-frame" renderings. settle a few feet in fore-rank of the gallery wall, Safe, 1998-99 fabricateed mainly from foam-core, allows record from behind into a narrow space with just enough range for the viewer and a pile of pliable white pompoms. As much as it provokes a personal haven, Safe is too hyemal and wobbly to provide a lasting feeling of refuge. Cooper's flirtation with architecture and pathos in Safe is representative of her awareness of numerous sources--arte povera, lo-fi aesthetics, Mike Kelley craft-while also demonstrating that she's too smart to aggressively latch onward to any of them. Driven through the frenetic activity of Cooper's hand, presenting drawing concerning drawing upon drawing, her enterprise is largely about aesthetic pleasure, unless it's also savvy enough to maintain everyone interested.

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