Wish you were here
Jamie Cooper
Wish you were here
Jamie Cooper
Reference
SAS0075_002
Materials
street lamp
Suitable Locations for the Work
- Indoors
- Outdoors
About the Artwork
Cooper is interested in making sculptures that invoke a sense of the uncanny, He sometimes starts
with cultural artefacts ( language, pictographs, domestic furniture, but in this case Streetlights) and change them to try and make an uncanny version of the original object. In doing so, maybe the viewer no longer see's the world as a solid and unchanging thing but instead as David Graeber says “...something we make, and could
just as easily make differently”.
The work discusses late Capitalism induced end of the Anthropocene, this has become the primary concern driving Cooper's research and theoretical practice today. Cooper's practice has grown to draw on Sci-fi futurism to construct theoretical 'other places' beyond capitalist realism, where there is the cognitive room to imagine more optimistic futures.
Background, history, commissioner of the work
Made from 100% recycled street lamps donated by North Ayrshire Council.
Thematic/contextual information
I have always viewed Streetlights as having a strange metaphysical potentiality about them, the long and dark Scottish winters helping invoke a transformative vibe as you walk in and out of the streetlight illuminations. The 'Wish you were here' streetlights were an attempt to draw on this strange potentiality.
