In Uncertainties, a two-person project of Robert MacDonald’s paintings and Laura Cooper’s sculptures, the line is forever alternating between breach and continuity. Both of the artists work with ideas of control and spontaneity within strict procedural boundaries and each explores surface and depth in complex, open-ended, and indeterminate ways. MacDonald’s undulating lines appear to originate from some inaccessible depth from which they confront on an almost irreconcilably smooth surface, seemingly from below. His paintings are simultaneously meticulous and spontaneous as if the constraints of the process allow the gesture to be made, his expression both exploratory and hesitant. Cooper’s painting and sculptures play with recurring, infinitely mutable clusters of lines inspired by “multiple biomorphic or spatial forms on both micro and macro levels.” Her forms are simultaneously big and small, outside and in, and for Cooper, are a metaphor of the spaces our bodies and mind occupy.  Cooper’s work presents us with a “tangled breathing mass” of disquieted density that feels ethereal and draws the viewer to navigate the real and imagined spaces of her work.

Artists: Laura Cooper Robert MacDonald