PRESS

2009

Johnny Ray Huston, Our Weekly Picks, "San Francisco artists love cinema iconography: Jason Mecier renders movie stars with beans and noodles, Jim Winters brings fluorescent color to film stills, and Maria Forde has turned drawings of actresses into buttons. Alika Cooper loves a screen siren, and she knows all about the appeal of a blonde. She first made an impression on me with her portraits of Hitchcock-era Tippi Hedren. In "A Cold Wave," she uses paint to conjure a variety of double Farrah Fawcetts. Morbidity and luxurious beauty intertwine in the resulting moody works.”

San Francisco Bay Guardian, September 4

Hiya Swanhuyser, Its Just Not Farrah, “Childish, flattened, and floating in anonymous space, Alika Cooper's gouached divas stare out of their canvases, helpless. At "A Cold Wave," the painter takes on Hollywood femininity of the modern era, with a special focus on Farrah Fawcett. Cooper's Fawcetts usually appear in twinned pairs, their shapeliness smeared, but instantly recognizable. Audrey Hepburn comes in for a similar love/smush treatment, making us think of the abyss between how women appear to others versus the bizarre, hypercritical visions they level at their own reflections. Maybe the interiority comes from the women's eyes, which often betray a striking emotional intensity. Elise Irving's "New Lightboxes" runs concurrently. ”,

SF Weekly, September 3.

Sura Wood, Whats up at the galleries this fall?, “Mark Wolfe Contemporary Art ,Alika Cooper: A Cold Wave. L.A. painter Alika Cooper probes the psychology of the women of the Silver Screen in her portraits of glamorous, unattainable Hollywood stars from the 1920s through the 70s, working from film stills. The elusive Greta Garbo, the once vital, impossibly toned Farrah Fawcett, a gamine Audrey Hepburn, the pouting girl-woman Brigitte Bardot, and the dramatic facial architecture of Faye Dunaway are all duly re-imagined in Cooper's rumination on the fleeting nature of fame, and the isolation that accompanies great beauty. There's something desolate about these leading ladies, former "it" girls for whom the hot glare of the spotlight, even life itself, has moved on. Cooper drives home this latter point by juxtaposing her gallery of aloof lovelies with derelict rural scenes detached from context and background. The instantly recognizable faces are beached once the adoration has faded, and as abandoned as the deserted blacktop with its neglected basketball hoop, or the milk barn stranded in a field with only a denuded tree to its name. Sept. 3-Oct. 17. www.wolfecontemporaryart.com”,

The Bay Area Reporter, August 20 (Fine Arts)

Fette, i miss you los angeles edition, “And yet, I don’t miss you LA, which makes for the persistent duality of our relationship. I left this city almost three months ago and I am as eager to see her it as I am nervous. Friday night and
I am delirious and nostalgic, dreaming of earthquakes and dirty rollerskating. Fine, I am on my way.Flog alumni and favorite, Alika Cooper knows how to carry the American romanticism well. I like this recent piece of hers, Streamline, 2009, gouache on paper. [Follow Alika on Flickr]”,

The Flog- Berlin, July

2008

Steven Vroom, Cairo more than just the new kid on the block, "Ashbee and Leshefka have tapped Alika Cooper, Pete Kuzov, Kyle Ranson, Chad States and Edie Tsong for the group exhibition "The Garden of Earthly Delights," which runs through Sept. 9. The exhibit fills the front gallery space admirably with photographs, drawings and paintings. Some major hits in the show include the almost Cycladic environments in the photos of Pete Kuzov. Four photos hung in a grid combine to give an ethereal prehistoric narrative with tiny elements of modernity subtly slipped in. Alika Cooper's gouaches are masterful examples of the dynamism that marries line and color together. ",

Capitol Hill Times, Seattle, WA August (Visual Art)

2007

Paul Morris Gallery, Glamour, Glory and the Good Old Days, “Alika Cooper, Robert Crumb, Rachel Kaye, Manuela Paz, Lindsey Muscato, Philippe Weisbecker. Paul Morris Gallery is pleased to present, “Glamour Glory and the Good Old Days”, a group show featuring six artists. The show examines ideas of beauty, and self-reflection. Some of the work in this exhibition alludes to the luxury of solitude. Perceptions of self, related to although not limited by, media, relationships and the details in between. Delicately painted portraits of celebrated females rendered with gouache on earthtoned print making paper are the subjects of Alika Cooper’s most recent work. Cooper blurs the mythic qualities of her female stars with her opaque renderings of a handful of celebrities, classic and contemporary. Cooper diffuses the aura associated with celebrity by flattening and abstracting the subject’s features. Her subjects eventually appear as more of a memory then a headline.”

OneArtWorld.com, July

Lupe Nunez-Fernandez, ALIKA COOPER AT MARK WOLFE CONTEMPORARY, SAN FRANCISCO,“Oakland-based artist Alika Cooper, approaches two very local sort of 'sunshine noir' icons - Golden Era Hollywood starlets and the often poor rural landscape of Southern California - with an ironic nostalgia that borders on family love, a sort of grotesque, but inevitable, warmth.

The new paintings and works on paper deal with two traditionally unconnected kinds of subject matter, but the viewer soon becomes privy to the discrete, but not totally silent, conversation going on here, a strange symmetry between two ideas of cultural abandonment that end up subverting and defining each other - the suburban dereliction of the deserted trailer park, left as if to fade in the sun, and the eroded, abjected representation of a former age's imagery of beauty, a slight slap in the face of commercially perfect, hyperglamourised femininity as edited and altered by Cooper's unassuming but powerfully wielded gouache paints. The stars in Cooper's psychologically charged cameos don't always resemble their real-life counterparts (eg the many faceted versions of Tippi, Jane, Anne); the range of verisimilitude within the series is slightly inconsistent, but this is probably part of the point, to distort in unexpected, inexplicable ways.

In fact, it was precisely the artist's ability to abstract such well-known figures and chosen moments that struck me most upon a first look: you end up forgetting who you're looking for, and end up just looking as if at clues of strangers, and of strangeness, like you might when facing the simplified, fluid strokes in the rich in unconscious memories, highly symbolic work of Norbert Schwontkowski. Famous faces break up into restless eyes, simplified into the shadowy silhouette of a cheekbone, people frozen not just in their film-still expressions, but emotionally as well.

It's not hard to be drawn to this gallery of troubled faces, magnetically rendered images of sex-symbols turned into splotches of line and shadow as if placed under the metaphorical faucet of time, as if submerged and sinking. In this version of ugliness, I think a narrative of anonymity and isolation plays the key role - the step just before the formlessness of complete disappearance, whether it be of an embarrassingly, fearsomely non-distinct backyard scenario or a face dissolving into the light and darkness of the spotlight that defined it.”,

The Saatchi Gallery Online, July 31