Contributed by Sharon Butler / Diana Cooper’s new public art project “Double Take” is rich with art historical references and playful wit, breathing life into an otherwise unsightly ventilator shaft installed opposite the egress from the Roosevelt Island subway tunnel, where it blocks a magnificent view of the city across the East River. The mosaic, crafted in collaboration with glass artists in Italy, incorporates fractured and twisted linear perspective to create the illusion of roiling depth, blurring the boundary between static skyscrapers and the roaring East River.
Cooper, who has been represented by Postmasters Gallery since 1998, is best known for installations that incorporate a variety of ephemeral materials, such as intricate drawings, small sculptures, found objects, and enigmatic photographs. When we met on the island, Cooper told me that she grew up on Nantucket, and has been fascinated by Roosevelt Island for years. One of the significant challenges of this project was approaching it from an image-forward position, requiring a focus on picture and composition as the primary means of communication.
Stepping out of the subway into that crisp winter morning, I was caught off-guard by the unexpected dialogue between the mosaic and the cityscape behind it. Cooper’s pipes and shafts, rendered in tiles of mixed sizes, shapes, and materials, seemed to spring to life, transforming the purely functional air shaft into an exuberant spectacle. It struck me as a quirky homage to the industrial elegance of Precisionist painters like Charles Sheeler and George Ault, who saluted the allure of industrial architecture when factories were new. Al Held’s vibrant subway mosaics, which transform blandly practical tunnels into engaging passageways, also come to mind. At the same time, the work nods to speculative urban visions such as Kim Stanley Robinson’s Manhattan 2140, foreseeing a New York reshaped by rising waters into a labyrinth of canals and floating infrastructure.
What ties “Double Take” together with Cooper’s previous work is the visual language of the urban landscape, which has always inspired and informed her installations regardless of the materials she has employed. In this case, she turns a poorly situated HVAC structure into something that enhances rather than obstructs the view, replacing a missing section of the skyline while celebrating the hard edges and vitality of the city itself.
“Diana Cooper: Double Take,” Roosevelt Island Subway stop on the F Train.
Also on Roosevelt Island: The Franklin D. Roosevelt Four Freedoms Park designed by Louis Kahn; the ruin of an old Smallpox Hospital; New York City Lunatic Asylum (the renovated Octagon that inspired the gate on Cooper’s project, reopened as the lobby entrance to a pair of apartment buildings). Read more about Roosevelt Island’s fascinating history here.
About the author: Sharon Butler is a painter and the publisher of Two Coats of Paint.
