Artist: Cooper Jacoby
Exhibition title: Matte Wetter
Curated by: Moritz Scheper
Venue: Staatliche Kunsthalle Baden-Baden, Baden-Baden, Germany
Date: September 3 – October 9, 2016
Photography: Karolina Sobel, all images copyright and courtesy of the artist and Staatliche Kunsthalle Baden-Baden, Germany
The “Microbial Home” by the company Phillips, a so-called “domestic ecosystem” which consists of a kitchen, refrigeration, waste disposal, etc. One component in this model home is a colored glass beehive for urban beekeeping. Bees are supposed to fly through a hole in a condo’s window into the hive’s glass dome on the other side, where the apartment inhabitants then watch the colony produce honey and wax in their living space, later harvesting it for themselves.
The hive as a corroding, motor system, rather than a healthy, living one…. with malfunctioned, exhausted materials seeping into or remolding the original, passing as eco and symbiotic.
An appliance re-engineered as an exquisite corpse…nature’s “perfect, lightweight engineering,” honeycomb’s hexagonal cell structure…rubbed raw in each damaged, after-market, and insectile iteration.
Colliding orbits of waste parts: sections from a dead wasp hive recast in plastic, encrusted with the carbon monoxide-trapping, rare-earth coating of a scrap catalytic converter:
Burnt out components strain to regulate and convert their flows. In the hives, the failure occurs in the output: the catalytic cores leak the coating which limits exhaust. With the lights, the problem comes from their input: they flicker because their fixtures are fed the wrong current. New bulbs are choked so they can’t fully ignite and dead bulbs are overheated so the remaining mercury vapor trapped inside glows like a candle. This inability to reach a homeostasis suspends the hardware in a sort of purgatorial stutter with new parts rapidly burning out and bulbs at the end of their life being dimly resurrected…live systems in zombie-states, materials running in their afterlives.
Cooper Jacoby, born 1989 in Princeton, New Jersey, lives and works in Los Angeles. He has had solo shows at Mathew, Berlin, and High Art, Paris, as well as participating in group shows at KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin, Neuer Aachener Kunstverein, Aachen, Freedman Fitzpatrick, Los Angeles, and White Flag Projects, St. Louis.
Cooper Jacoby, HIVE, 2016
Glass, galvanized steel, aluminum panel, aramid paper, urethane resin, epoxy resin, stainless steel honeycomb pipe, acrylic paint, pigment, magnets, 59 x 37,5 x 25,5 cm
Cooper Jacoby, EOL, 2016
Fluorescent bulbs, burnt out fluorescent bulb, aluminum light fixtures, 304 cm x 304 cm x 10 cm
Cooper Jacoby, EOL, 2016
Fluorescent bulbs, burnt out fluorescent bulb, aluminum light fixtures, 304 cm x 304 cm x 10 cm
Cooper Jacoby, HIVE, 2016
Glass, galvanized steel, aluminum panel, aramid paper, urethane resin, epoxy resin, stainless steel honeycomb pipe, acrylic paint, pigment, magnets, 59 x 37,5 x 25,5 cm
Cooper Jacoby, HIVE, 2016
Glass, galvanized steel, aluminum panel, aramid paper, urethane resin, epoxy resin, stainless steel honeycomb pipe, acrylic paint, pigment, magnets, 59 x 37,5 x 25,5 cm
Cooper Jacoby, HIVE, 2016
Glass, galvanized steel, aluminum panel, aramid paper, urethane resin, epoxy resin, stainless steel honeycomb pipe, acrylic paint, pigment, magnets, 59 x 37,5 x 25,5 cm
Cooper Jacoby, HIVE, 2016
Glass, galvanized steel, aluminum panel, aramid paper, urethane resin, epoxy resin, stainless steel honeycomb pipe, acrylic paint, pigment, magnets, 59 x 37,5 x 25,5 cm
Cooper Jacoby, HIVE, 2016
Glass, galvanized steel, aluminum panel, aramid paper, urethane resin, epoxy resin, stainless steel honeycomb pipe, acrylic paint, pigment, magnets, 59 x 37,5 x 25,5 cm
Cooper Jacoby, HIVE, 2016
Glass, galvanized steel, aluminum panel, aramid paper, urethane resin, epoxy resin, stainless steel honeycomb pipe, acrylic paint, pigment, magnets, 59 x 37,5 x 25,5 cm
