October 1st – November 15th, 2017
Alika Cooper will exhibit new work at STNDRD as part of The Terrain Biennial – Enos Park. The Terrain Biennial is an international exhibition of site-specific art made for front yards, balconies, and porches. Alika’s flag, Barbell, will be installed at 1134 N 4th Street, Springfield, Illinois.
Barbell is a flag made in likeness to the knocker ball hair ties popular with young girls in the 1970s and 1980s, and which remain an iconic hair tie today. Given the dexterous hand maneuvers required to use them, they are typically fastened by an adult and call to mind mother/daughter relationships.
Ambiguously situated and exaggerated in scale, the form hints at male and female objects. Like a hair tie found dangling in a bush, or strewn on a sidewalk, Barbell hangs suspended from its flag pole. Its resin beads are embedded with reeds from a creek, a Barbie doll high heel–one imagines the detritus of childhood collected in a stream eddy. Changing with the natural light, the suspended debris is reminiscent of a body submerged in a swimming pool, and each bead eerily refracts silhouettes and optically distorts the proportions of the embedded objects within.
ALIKA COOPER (b. 1979, Guam) lives and works in Los Angeles. She received both her MFA and BFA from California College of the Arts, San Francisco, CA. Solo exhibitions include Madeleine Cake at SITUATIONS, New York, Wet Suits at Good Weather Gallery; Have A Sex at fort gondo, Saint Louis; The Disguised Edge at MULHERIN, Toronto; UPBRAID at Night Gallery, Los Angeles; and GLASS at Eleanor Harwood Gallery, San Francisco, CA. She was the recipient of the Rema Hort Mann Foundation grant, the Magic-Trillium Press Yesland Prize, and the Jack and Gertrude Murphy Fellowship. She has participated in The Viewing Program at The Drawing Center, New York; MOTION PICTURE at The Saint Louis Art Museum; and was Artist in Residence at Galleria Studio Legale in Marzano Appio, Italy.