Justine Cooper’s body of work explores the experience of one’s body in today’s ‘electronic’ age. She works with digital, photo and other imaging media in the form of installation, video and individual works, such as the enigmatic and elegant sculptural piece, Self Portrait (1998). In this piece images from a Magnetic Resonance Image (MRI) scan of the artist’s head have been printed on perspex squares and stacked in an evenly spaced, quasi-minamalist cube, the interior of which holds a virtual, three dimensional head on the verge of material existence. Cooper recalls that the parent of an American collector who has acquired one of the limited series of these Self Portraits wanted to know where exactly the head was to be found inside the cube, a delightful confirmation of the extraodinary effect of this three-dimensional photo-media work.
Self Portrait plays with the aesthetic conventions of recent and contemporary art–the post-minimalist disappearance of the art object and indeed of the individual artist are reiterated ironically here–and also with our common assumptions about what it is to exist physically in the digital age. Like her other works, such as Rapt which also uses MRI scans (installation and video versions, 1998-2000) and her current work in progress, a planned ‘biological maze’ using projections of electron microscope images of tissue samples from the artist’s skin and other surface body cells, this piece engages with questions about what it is to have a body, to exist in physical space and to experience one’s self materially when high tech (medical) science and computer imaging are redrawing the borders of the body proper and inverting the scale and dimensions of its appearance.
It is this combination of aesthetically adept and acute conceptual exploration which makes Justine Cooper’s such a promising ‘new media’ artist. She tries to make works which touch on profound issues for both the practice of art today and the practice of everyday life as a human being living ‘in’ a human body. Neither simply dismissive of contemporary technology nor blandly celebrating its latest offerings, Cooper is trying to examine the passage of the image into forms other than the iconic or representational, forms which are better understood as operational, informational, and specialist in their significance and application.
At the same time she is searching out the aesthetic consequences of this for the artist, a figure who is traditionally seen as one who expresses his or her unique self in a universally accessible gesture via the action of the hand on a surface support or an unformed material base. When the predominant experience of the image becomes that of a non-referential, informational diagram which projects its own virtual materiality as required, the traditional role of the artist as maker of expressive or iconic gestures on material supports that echo his/her (and thereby our) physical presence may be in need of reinvention to avoid becoming nostalgic or even moribund. Justine Cooper is working to this hypothesis, making beautiful and thought-provoking art as her modus operandi.
Having graduated with a Masters of Visual Art in Electronic Art from Sydney College of the Arts in 1998, Cooper has already shown in such places as New York, Chicago, Beijing, Rotterdam, Sao Paolo, as well as around Australia, and she is currently held in collections in Australia, Europe and the U.S.A, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York), the Museum of Victoria and the Queensland Art Gallery. Currently completing a project with the assistance of a New Media grant from the Australia Council, Cooper is emerging as an increasingly significant Australian artist whose work is formally and conceptually contemporary and innovative.