PROJECTS :
Complementary
Keystone Art Gallery |
Los Angeles, CA
Duo-Art Exhibit
Complementary
Run of Show: Aug 29 - Sept 7
Opening Reception: Aug 29th 5-9pm
Where: Keystone Gallery - 338 S Avenue 16, Lincoln Heights, CA 90031
Press Statement
Courtney Wynn Cooper & Loren A. Armstrong are excited to present Complementary, their premiere collaborative installation. Complementary focuses on color relationships and the artists’ ability to create emotional landscapes for imagined interior and exterior spaces.
As individual artists, Cooper and Armstrong’s practices explore parallel themes of color, form, and composition, with a shared affinity for the surreal in the ordinary. When their work is integrated, a vibrant color palette emerges, translating complex subconscious narratives.
Cooper’s work is often driven by structural explorations in color, while Armstrong’s focus is on translation of the ephemeral life inside of structures. In conversation and practice, their work aligns to discuss the “body and spirit” of homes, rooms, and compositions. Complementary expands on these themes, which they have both long explored, separately and together.
Artist Statement | Loren A. Armstrong
In a highly individualized culture, we are expected to achieve, create, and move through the world with the self at the center. My work — in its color, imperfections, and repeated motifs — is made with the understanding that art, community, and life is an ecosystem communicating across a vast network of living and past history. When making my work, I carry with me the imagery of bodies with more than one community of self: many arms, hands, bits and pieces. A palette of colors without the idea that any set should not belong together; just as the functions of sorrow & joy, the mundane & the divine, cannot be housed alone, but exist inexplicably as two things at once. By following a strict internal logic, which requires that all markmaking, color, and compositional choices be decided instantaneously and followed through, the work is allowed to evolve and expand off of itself during its creation. This makes the work honest & flawed, but surprising; with slight variations in mood, tone, material or circumstance shifting the voice of the work alongside my own experience of it.
Artist Statement | Courtney W. Cooper
My work serves to quiet a messy, overwhelming world. The repetition of image, shape, and color help externalize my experience in an often anxious, obsessive mind.Through my practice I explore feelings of distress and isolation, reclaiming space and experience from the cycling chaos of everyday life. Through this process, what ultimately ends up being created are images and installations that explore environments in their most simplistic form.
Aesthetically, I’m informed by ordinary architectural geometry as it interacts with natural light to create bold shapes and silhouettes. I find these shadows often form a second, hidden, and ephemeral artwork. I recreate these fleeting moments by memory in order to hold onto the moment of stillness and beauty longer. I use structure and rules in these spaces, both inside and outside the frame of a painting, to control spaces that are ultimately uncontrollable. I strive to make spaces that encompass the feeling an environment can project onto someone, whether it is good or bad.