June 18, 2007



ALIKA COOPER

Dates: July 19 - August 30, 2007

Hours: Tuesday - Friday, 10:00 am - 5:30 pm; Saturday, 11:00 am-5:00 pm

Address: 49 Geary Street, Suite 202
San Francisco, California 94108
http://www.wolfecontemporary.com

Reception: July 19, 2007, 5:30 – 7:30 pm

Mark Wolfe Contemporary Art is pleased to present new paintings and works on paper by the
Oakland-based artist Alika Cooper.

Cooper’s new exhibition merges two seemingly disparate bodies of work. The show combines a
series of portraits depicting Hollywood actresses with a series of rural landscapes. The portraits are
intense, psychological, and difficult. Working with film stills taken from American movies released
between 1950 and 1980, Cooper takes a “hyper-glamorized” image of femininity, and renders it
grotesque. The landscapes, meanwhile, Cooper describes as landscapes of poverty. Poverty, she
notes, is considered “ugly,” an aesthetic judgment that also contains implicit judgments of value and
morality. “Ugliness” forms a key theme in Cooper’s recent work. Ugliness, and disgust, threaten to
burst through the surface. Each image carries a threat, a sense of potential disruption, of psychic, or
perhaps even social, unrest.

Born in Guam, Cooper grew up in Southern California, residing in both San Diego and Los Angeles.
Her paintings share something of the “sunshine noir” aesthetic that marks the work of fellow
Southern California artists. The phrase is often used to describe an earlier generation of artists, such
as David Hockney, Ed Ruscha, and John Baldessari, whose works deliver light and shadow in equal
measure.

Cooper graduated from the M.F.A. program at the California College of Arts in 2005. Her work has
appeared at the LightBox and Black Market galleries in Los Angeles, at the Aiden Savoy and Jen
Bekman galleries in New York City, at the Lobot Gallery in Oakland, and at Triple Base, 111 Minna,
and Varnish galleries in San Francisco. Cooper’s illustrations frequently appear in national
publications, such as the New York Times Sunday Magazine.



Photographs and high-resolution .jpgs available on request.