Brian Cooper

My work generally focuses on the relationship between consciousness and the material world. I have always been fascinated with the meditative, ethereal effects of highly illusionistic painting like my favorites, the Flemish Primitives. I also enjoy the playful strangeness of Surrealism, the Chicago Imagists, West Coast psychedelia, and underground comics.

In “Things Thinking” I created an oppositional layout of 13 red oil paintings of various sizes hung in salon style on one wall with a 12' wide dark blue painting of a famous early modular synthesizer on the other. The exhibition also included a small stage in front of the blue synthesizer painting with 4 upholstered benches on the gallery floor whose forms are similar to the red paintings. Several music events in the gallery were held throughout the length of the show. The exhibition continues my interest in the mind’s relationship with things while also suggesting dichotomies of human and machine, part versus whole, and art and music.

The red paintings can be described as highly illusionistic images of curvy abstracted forms with colors similar to varied skin tones. They twist and bend in a way that is part orgy and part wrestling match. They lick and caress as they push and tug. The paintings become a sort of odd family portrait where the sum of their diverse family members form a greater graceful choreographed whole.

The blue synthesizer painting is called "Perceptions Delusion (Whoever Felt It Dealt It)". It is an allegorical painting about researcher Donald Hoffman's ideas about our relationship with reality. Perception is a kind of interface with the world using a variety of metaphoric switches and dials to detect what is going on around us. These dials and switches create a sort of "mental map" of what our senses detect. So in other words, we don't see reality as it truly is. What we see instead is just a mental model of reality. Hoffman suggests that we are mistaking our map for reality. This painted curtain of "dials and switches of perception" obstructs our view of something deeper.

I've always been attracted to the complexity of modular synthesizers. Their dozens of switches and knobs with tangled patch cords trigger strange otherworldly sounds that feel abstract and contemplative. I've also been awestruck by the illusionism and gracefulness of painted drapery in the work of the Flemish Primitives like Jan Van Eyck.

My paintings combine these inspirations. The complexity of the machine fuses with the ethereal tone of classical European religious painting. Intertwined with bursts of distortion and abstraction, these flowing curtains of knobs and switches create a sort of psychedelic fraying of reality. A visual music erupts as the paintings' visual illusions make the viewer playfully question what is real.

This union is ultimately inspired by ideas from contemporary thinkers Donald Hoffman and Iain McGilchrist. Both claim that our contemporary worldview is obstructing us from a deeper connection to reality.

Hoffman suggests we don't see reality as it truly is. Instead we create or invent a mental map or mental model of reality. He claims that we are mistaking our map for reality. So the synthesizers are metaphors for how we create this model of reality. Perception is a kind of interface with the real using all sorts of metaphoric switches and dials to create a "map" of what our senses detect. In some of the paintings many well known visual illusions are used like the vase/face illusion and the duck/rabbit illusion. They point out how the viewer must decide which version of the image, or in other words, which mental model they prefer to see. The book goes on to suggest that even our idea of space and time can also be seen as a mental model or mental map that we have invented. The synthesizers are superimposed on various curtains in the paintings. The curtains suggest that our mental map is actually obstructing our consciousness from something deeper. This is similar to Hindu ideas of "maya" where the world that one experiences is seen as misleading as far as its true nature is concerned.

McGilchrist writes that the hemispheres of the brain have different modes of attention. The right hemisphere deals with the global picture, including the periphery and the background. While the left hemisphere deals with the local, what is right in front of it, in the foreground. You might describe these as broad-beam (right) and narrow-beam (left) attention.

McGilchrist makes the case that the left hemisphere has taken over our minds and reshaped the world in its image in a way that is good for neither humans nor the planet and everything that lives on it. It's a way of thinking which is reductive and mechanistic. The left hemisphere treats the world as a simple resource to be exploited. It's made us enormously powerful. It's enabled us to become wealthy, but it's also meant that we've lost the means to understand the world, to make sense of it, to feel satisfaction and fulfilment through our place in the world. The left brain pays sharply focused attention to detail and sorts and organizes people and things into neat, orderly categories. But McGilchrist says the left brain doesn't understand relationships. It's the right brain that understands context and the big picture like our relationships with others and how we fit into a complex, non-linear world in which everything is connected.

The synthesizers depicted are the heralded Emerson Moog Modular and the Buchla 100 from the late 1960's, and the Serge Paperface, and the E-MU Modular System from early 70's. They all have their roots in a convergence of cold war government research and the Psychedelic era of the 1960's. They are technical fetes of engineering that want to "plug-in" and connect with some type of mysterious deeper reality.

The painting of the dark blue Emerson Moog Modular doubles its width as a mirrored image of the instrument. It creates a larger and more symmetrical composition that gives the painting a more secure and ordered composition like that of a traditional European religious painting. Its modular components, dials, and ports create a machine-like order and dense abstract rhythm while its orange and blue cables curve and dance like the curvy lines of paint of a Brice Marden abstraction. Its scale envelopes the viewer like the theatricality of a Renaissance fresco. Some areas of the painting also dissolve into textured abstract pattern that reminds the viewer of visualized sound waves or some sort of glitch in the curtain's illusion. The theatre backdrop support of the painting furthers Hoffman's ideas by referencing the invented nature of the stage.

This is a series of 12"x12" paintings of dilapidated phone books. They are in transition from being useful sources of information to obsolete debris. They are going feral. They are aesthetically liberated by their neglect as their hyperbolic representations in paint push their experience to hallucinatory levels.

Each painting is framed with a long slit on the right side that contains a paper sleeve that holds a 12" vinyl record stored behind the canvas. Only 10 records are made. One for each of the 10 paintings in the show. The record is an album of 10 experimental rock songs written by Cooper.

The title of the series, "All That Is Solid Melts Into Air", is a quote from Marx about the tendency for capitalism to sweep away the traditions and stability that characterized earlier periods of history. This series is about a desire to hold on to experiences that are rarified, in depth, and personal similar to experiences we have with older forms of media like books, vinyl records, and paintings. The show's unusual feature of combining painting and record is analogous to the collapsing boundaries of digital media and its trivializing effects. Their alliance references the traditions and rituals of album cover art when the days of limited access to art and music made experiencing them more rarefied and unique. Lyrics on the record wax poetic about social change and transformation reinforcing the show's focus of navigating the pace of change that we are all in the midst of.

Shapes of black, white, and brown skin form intimate writhing masses of assimilation. They playfully support and adjust to one another bending and shaping themselves to fit in. They jockey for position while beads of sweat show signs of stress and exertion. They are part orgy and part wrestling match. They lick and caress as they push and tug. Boxed in by the edges of the canvas, they are pushed into a pluralistic collective whole.

Their abstraction makes the body seem far stranger and more uncanny than one would normally admit. This traditionally existentialist strategy yields a sense of freedom and distance from the din of the moment. Meanwhile the paintings' detailed illusionism celebrates and glorifies the figures' corporeal existence in a manner that affirms their strange struggle. The paintings become a sort of family portrait where the sum of its diverse family members forms a greater graceful choreographed whole.

“Behavior” is a book of drawings as well as an album of music all created by Brian Cooper a.k.a. “Earth Like Planets”. Its charcoal drawings are playfully dark and surreal. The album has a post-punk/ dark wave sound. This 80 page hardcover book is 12.5” square and also contains a 12” vinyl record of the album on its inside front cover. Each song corresponds with each chapter of drawings within the book. All chapters refer to specific research on subjects related to the mind and human behavior. This project was made to call attention to the beauty of consciousness by connecting our experiences of art, music, and science.

Made in 2019, these 6 graphite drawings are mounted on laser printed orange to blue mat boards and assembled in a hand made one of a kind book cloth portfolio case. The drawings are playful meditations on mind and the material world and their relationship of the part to the whole. Its title is a reference to Iain McGilchrist's idea that the left hemisphere of the brain is concerned with the parts of a system while the right is concerned with the whole. The book cloth portfolio is used as a metaphor for seeing a collection as a unified whole.

Most of these upholstered sculptures were made between 2000 and 2005.

In 2007 I started thinking about how the mind constructs things. We construct art with physical materials to get at something in the mind. We construct our beliefs, our selves, our reality. We construct our sense of space as entropy’s signal of time is a constant presence.

This series of paintings use a tufted upholstery motif. they are from 1993-2006. The upholstery motif has a reference to the body that connects my earlier work of abstracted torsos.

This series of paintings is inspired by ideas in physics that talk about empty space as a substance that is able to stretch and bend. Their imagined shapes are playful examples of how the mind longs to grasp abstract thought.

This series is about a tension between the freedom of imagining forms and the harsh practical realities of that form physically manifesting itself. They are abstract public art sculptures that struggle with decay.

In this series I first documented all the available books on physics at my local bookstore. I then recreated their exact dimensions in wood. Then, inspired by their original covers, I painted new versions on the wood panels.

The identity of the art piece becomes blurred. It is a painting on wood on the wall as well as a book about physics. This blurring also occurs with the merging of the book’s original cover design and my version. Thinking about reality is merged with the experience of reality. This series continues my interest in expressing the nature of the physical world and its relationship with consciousness.