Laura Cooper and Nick Taggart at Bliss - Los Angeles, California - Review of Exhibitions - Brief Article

LO ANGELES

Bliss, an informal gallery operated by dint of artist Ken Riddle in his bungalow, prov to be the finished environment to exhibit pieces through Laura Cooper and Nick Taggart. The sum of two units artists, who are married, work the two separately and collaboratively. Cooper's statuarys which explore the realm of nap and dreams, nestled comfortably in the living extent hallway and bedroom; Taggart's abstract paintings and drawings were hung above doorways and appeared full-force in the dining-room gallery.

Cooper uses fairy-tale metaphors as launching pads for works made from clothing, mattresses and plain bed linens. freshly she has also begun to stage photographs (taken by means of Taggart) in which she wears or performs with the sculptural pieces. Night Gown is a stunning dres with a herculean parachutelike skirt. For the related photographs Flying Dream in Garden and Demiwitch, Cooper artificial positions perched in a trellis in her garden, wearing the dres with equal reason that its billowing skirt spreads like a haze behind her. Installed in the hallway above a small chandelier, the dres wrap uped the visitor like a canopy or portable lodge it conjures up a entertainer of references, including the comfort tendered by the Virgin's protective cape in Piero's Madonna della Misericordia, the skirts of the Sugarplum Fairy in The Nutcracker, and the protective skirts of Joan Crawford in Johnny Guitar and Hattie McDaniels in Gone With the Wind.

Cooper's piece beak made from layers of bedsheets strung from the ceiling with kite string, refer tos an ethereal ship, a stylized utensil bound for other worlds. Skin and Bone consists of an unclose box spring covered in transparent white silk that reads as a kind of skeletal Minimalist grid.

Taggart's drawings play with inner constructions and changes in scale. His wall grid Forty Drawings consists of abstracted close-up and overviews of naturally occurring forms - a polyp a cave, a rose a waterfall, a shaft of lightning and a strength ending. Paintings like Ignite and Interior combine ultimate parts from the drawings with swirling lines and vibrant color. Other canvases rework his earlier figurative paintings, altering their forms to give an inkling of micro-and macrocosmic structures.

Taggart move rounds his attention to his wife's dreamscape in their ongoing collaborative cast Exterior of Unconsciousness (one photograph each morning before waking). Regularly rising before her, Taggart takes Polaroids of Cooper asleep; the discharges are presented as a diaristic grid. Cooper is a restles sleeper whose changes cover a wide range of tosses and revolves The piece is not alone a fascinating analysis of unconscious changes it is also a curious document of a couple's intimacy and a spouse's obsessive, voyeuristic gaze.

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