A COLD WAVE "Very soon she was a star - Johnny Cash, Ballad of a Teenage Queen
In Johnny Cash's song: Ballad of a Teenage Queen, we are taken up into the story of a teenage beauty from a small town. She leaves her home and becomes a film star. At the end of the ballad, this fortunate woman, who found material satisfaction, but not love or happiness, returns again to her hometown and the boy she left behind, who is still at the candy store, ready and waiting for her. It is one variant on a familiar myth- where some form of inner nobility (manifested through talent, bravery, sound judgment or some other virtue) is matched by a characters rise to from a humble background to some form of fortune, power or fame. These stories work themselves out in various ways- sometimes the lost princess or prince lives happily ever after in the palace, sometimes they return to the farm, perhaps after learning a lesson about where true nobility lies (there's no place like home...). This is also a tale that gets twisted around in the capitalist dreams and mythologies of America, where there is no clear aristocracy or obvious kings and queens. In their place, we have celebrities, tycoons and plutocrats, some are heirs or heiresses, while others struggled up from the working and farming classes and made their fortunes and marks. From the Dorothy Gale to the Great Gatsby, it seems to be one of our favorite tales, not only because it applauds our ideas of the virtues of the free markets and the frontier, but because it allows us to imagine, given the opportunity, that we can have what we want. Looking at a group of paintings by Alika Cooper brings this meta-story to mind; fraught paintings of film stars and female celebrities, are shown alongside gouache landscapes of the outer Midwest- scenes of trailers, things left in the yard past their season. There is something in the way that each of these groups of images is rendered that keeps the viewer moving between the possible values and endings, enduring quiet shifts between them that leave questions of desire open. Unlike so many other iterations of the tale, Coopers’ version consistently leaves out messages and morals. The groups of paintings retain the space of the story but leave out a clear direction in their internal narrative. The celebrities are ashen, their faces caught with the expressions that come in between the smiles and speeches. There is never a horizon in their world; no context surrounds them. The landscapes, though barren, reveal spaces in which a body might at least find a place to walk and sit down, a warm bed, a meal. Which heaven? To what place are some of those driveways and fields leading to and some of the starlets looking out towards? In the end, what we are left with, the medicine cabinet or the candy store? The images reflect one another, or perhaps they look at each other from either side of a vast field. Somewhere there is a fence, and as viewers, we perch on it, looking to either side, considering what we wanted and what we got. Text by Ted Purves In addition to two solo shows at Wolfe Contemporary, Cooper has staged solo exhibitions at Galleria Studio Legale in Rome, and Hamish Morrison Galerie in Berlin. Her works have been featured in the Crocker-Kingsley California Biennial, the DiRosa Preserve, and Paul Morris Gallery in New York. She received her MFA from the California College of the Arts in 2006. She lives and works in Los Angeles Mark Wolfe Contemporary Art Full Color Catalog available here
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