Jesse Harris at COOPER COLE, Toronto

COOPER COLE is pleased to announce Copypasta, the fourth solo exhibition by Jesse Harris at the gallery.

1. Winter, Ella. Don’t you know you can’t go home again?
The Yale Book of Quotations. New Haven, Connecticut: Yale University Press, p. 832
2. Wolfe, Thomas. 1940. You Can’t Go Home Again. First edition. New York: Harper & Brothers.

Returning to Toronto within his memory, Jesse Harris (b. 1981) recalls the formative and irreverent sentiment within a downtown shopping plaza Village by the Grange where he once originally discovered it at …it store! circa 1989-90.

At a recent online auction, Harris purchased the collection (of purchases) and surviving works of Toronto Artist Beth S, age fifteen. Beth S assembled hundreds of small items of ephemera from …it store! and perhaps, as mythology, she even worked there. She included original artworks in their display, as if to personalize her collection and position it in totality. Totally participant in parody of trendy cliches of the period, her work is now regarded as prophecy.

With Copypasta, Jesse Harris exhibits contemporary works of iconoclasm. Using this ephemera directly, he recollects The Last Supper (Leonardo) with whitewashed memory ware sculpture as profane articles of faith.

A simple table is composed as a still life with dozens of wine and liquor bottles. The glass containers have been stoned with mortar and painted in oil. Any labeling has been obscured in a Cubist reduction to vessel form and symbol. Each bottle carries a mini message, a conversational quip, a motto or truism found on a badge from the collection of Toronto artist Beth S, age fifteen (c. 1989-90).

Fast, cheap and easy messaging is refashioned as a placeholder. A •bullet point loaded artwork as an empty flask or fiasco after The Last Supper Party.

In this exhibition, Jesse Harris debuts a series of new work called DTFs. The artist has created repeated imagery to mimic wallpaper or packaging or giftwrap or flash. Gangsheets of decals printed on film recall his past work in commercial sign making both in production and material language. The graphics refer to fruit forbidden: ads, emoji, logos, ethos, mascots, memes. An iron-on irony diary of decalcomania, designs so transferred to pottery are now framed as a window and put up as a poster. Placement within the gallery of Harris’ DTFs matches with the one-point-perspectival fresco of Leonardo.

Copypasta also features miniature pieces from the artist’s personal archive including global Telephone Calling Cards illustrated by Leonardo da Vinci. Also novelty Credit Cards and void Cheques collected by both Jesse Harris and Toronto artist Beth S, age fifteen (c. 1989-90).

Various small paintings of soup beer cans feed the floor. Breadcrumb followers sweep and swipe and search results. Wet-washed treasured message at sea glass. Knick knack, bric-a-brac, a rockhound bleached beach-comb.

– Jesse Harris, 2026