Gail Cooper

The idea that we never directly experience anything, and instead experience it through our senses, is a touchstone in my desire to create work that shifts between a visceral and somatic response.

I reinterpret the transparency and luminescence of light in order to describe my ineffable experiences and use technology to capture the unseen. Low fidelity images are used as reference material as I mine photographic and filmic rifts to explore my own subtle shifts in perception. The softness of pastel and the slipperiness of oil invoke a similar blurriness which visually renders shifts in awareness. Both light and spirit behave in visceral ways and the ethereal image that emerges in my paintings and drawings act as my voice, calling from a realm in which language does not exist.

MFA, Studio Art, Mills College, Oakland, CA
BFA, Painting, San Francisco Art Institute, SF, CA
AS, Fashion Merchandising, Johnson & Wales University, Providence, RI

2019 Sausalito Art Festival, Sausalito, CA
2018 From Dusk to Dawn, O'Hanlon Center of the Arts, Mill Valley, CA
2018 Mill Valley Fall Arts Festival, Mill Valley, CA
2018 Start Up Art Fair, San Francisco, CA
2017 12°, Mills College, Oakland, CA
2016 Open Studios, Mills College, Oakland, CA
2015 Open Studios, Mills College, Oakland, CA
2015 Reaccreditation Show, San Francisco Art Institute,
San Francisco, CA
2015 Diego Rivera Gallery, San Francisco Art Institute,
San Francisco, CA
2015 Modus Vivendi, San Francisco Art Institute, San Francisco, CA2
2014 Concentrate, San Francisco Art Institute, San Francisco, CA
2014 BeLong, Diego Rivera Gallery, San Francisco, CA
2014 BCA Alumni Exhibition, Ballyvaughan, Ireland
2013 Hi-Vis, Burren College Gallery, Ballyvaughan, Ireland
2013 Burren Winterage Festival, Ballyvaughan, Ireland
2013 Live Art at Lunch, Ballyvaughan, Ireland
2013 Art by the Bay, Yick Wo Elementary Fundraiser,
San Francisco, CA
2012 Contemporary Practice Exhibit, Diego Rivera Gallery, San Francisco, CA
2012 I am Crime, Art on the Edge of Law, SOMARTS, San Francisco, CA