Justin Cooper – Yard Works: Geometric Botanical Studies at CAMi

Daisies (detail), Justin Cooper

The Transcendental Art of Justin Cooper.

Justin Cooper is currently showing his most recent artworks at the CAMi Main building in the Sutphin Gallery. The exhibition, Yard Works: Geometrical Botanical Studies contains wood panel artworks, many in pairs or larger groupings, and a selection of smaller graphite drawings. There is truth in advertising to Cooper's title for this show, as his subject matter consists of detailed, almost scientifically-executed, portraits of many different plant and flower varieties.

The overall look and presentation of Cooper's specimens echo the work of pioneering nature artists such as John James Audubon with his birds of North America, and lesser known names in the botanical field such as Pierre-Joseph Redoute and Priscilla Susan Bury. 

The detailed individual subjects depicted by these artists in their volumes of collected specimens, whether bird or plant kingdom, are made  monumental and sculptural by the center placement on the negative space of the non-distracting backgrounds of their pages. And there is an acknowledgment of the poetry of the natural world by these artists shown by the careful observation and meticulous rendering of their subjects. 

As individuals, the artists seemed infatuated to the point of obsession with the microcosm of the universe that they chose to capture in their portfolio collections.

Justin Cooper, with his latest exhibition, displays work of a similar transcendental mindset, one uniting individual spirit, nature and the divine. 

And there is something of the yellowed age and faded colors of old book plates that we also associate with them that seem present in Cooper's works via his choice of materials and technique. He achieves a warm and worn antiquity though the use of a the birch wood surface that forms the negative space around the plants he describes, and with the thin viscosity of his colors which mimic a sun-faded or time-bleached effect.  

Siberian Iris Tiles (detail), Justin Cooper

Cooper's technique, when speaking of the panels, is not just paint on wood, but rather pyrography, or 'writing with fire,' a traditional craft of creating designs with controlled burn marks.     

The exhibition manifest that accompanies the show explains that Cooper's works are a continuation of geometric botanical studies of plants in and around his Garfield Park home, with his latest emphasis on native Indiana wildflowers. 

The series and groupings seen in the current show, the multiples of a single variety, are inspired by the subtle changes he has observed in the individual plant varieties over successive growing seasons. 

The dark linearity of the underlying burn marks together with the thin oil glazes of his built-up colors, as explained in the artist statement, “are meant to evoke stained glass, ceramic tile, and wood inlay – art forms that have long inspired the development of this series.”

Origin of Materials and Methods. 

Evocations of stain glass, mosaics and wood inlay, perhaps even crochet knitting and fresco painting, are seen in Justin Cooper's work as early as his show Zero at Galerie Penumbra in the Murphy Art Center in 2006. Cooper's work in that show consisted of mixed media on thick wood panels with built-up glazes of color and gold leaf flourishes. 

His many various panels displayed in that show were like the opulent opening pages of Medieval manuscripts with their symbolic figures, complex gleaming decoration and the nebulous code of the parables suggested by their alchemic cast of characters and objects.    

Zero, Justin Cooper, 2006
postcard from the exhibition by the same name

Julianna Thibodeaux, writing for NUVO Newsweekly, reviewed the show in a September 2006 edition,

“What to make of such deliciously perfected images of owls, bats, bees, lilies, roosters, spiders, rabbits and the like? Even these, richly suggestive, do not stand alone; some surround like a halo the symbolic image of the feminine, a perfectly proportioned female figure, hand open, the divine receptive vehicle. But Cooper throws in smaller, more enigmatic symbols, like spaces on a game of Zen Monopoly: we see an Rx symbol, an umbrella, a devil's pitchfork, the chemical formula for water, the nuclear symbol, a car battery a pair of dice, a seashell. Profane and sacred, human and divine, and points of grey in between.” 

In an evolution of his imagery, but a continuation of his techniques and materials, Cooper presented new works in 2011 in Indianapolis at a show called Missed the Boat.  The exhibition was also reviewed in NUVO, this time by Charles Fox, on October 10, 2011,

“Justin Cooper fills Primary Gallery with a fresh, engaging  and witty group of paintings depicting various animals in the face of impending environmental catastrophe. Drawing on influences including Aesop's Fables and 18th - 19th century Japanese printmaker and painter Katsushika Hokusai...

He keeps his color palette limited to mostly blues and whites, aside from the colors used for the animals and gold leaf, which he uses effectively to render halos around the animals and embellish decorative details of the paintings.” 

The same writer also covers a following show by Cooper, Spark Fishing, in the March 18, 2013 issue

of NUVO,

“As thoughtful and realized a show as one has come to expect from Justin Cooper who typically builds his shows around a single idea – and in this case, it's about the attempt to harness energy...

The reintroduction of humans into his art is welcome; female figures are prominent within the body of work (with especially stunning impact in Collector). Despite depicting the search for energy, the net effect of Spark Fishing is to leave the viewer with a feeling of peace.” 

The article contained the image of Cooper's Wave Length from the show, which is an interesting mash-up of a decorative foreground element reminiscent of Maya glyphs, an art nouveau woman in profile at the center, and surrounding, Japanese print-style clouds or energy fields that billow and swirl. 

Over the course of these shows and the years, Cooper would establish his favored materials – wood panels, thin and translucent layers of paint and the decorative embellish of gold leaf – that he continues to utilize in his current geometric botanicals. 

Toward an Infinitude of Flowers.

The transcendental movement was birthed in opposition to the prior poetic indulgences of the romantic era. 

Of several main and related practitioners, Ralph Waldo Emerson preferred essay to fiction, and observation to ecstasy.  Henry David Thoreau lived in a cabin in solitude for two years and made a careful chronicle of his simplified life. Emily Dickinson was to ponder a vast and eternal universe from the seclusion of a room in her father's home. 

There is something analogous to the transcendental approach in Cooper's latest art.  

He has traveled from the conceptual, symbolic and surrealistic narrative of his earlier paintings to the refined decorative simplification and distilled perfection of the current pieces we see in Yard Works.   

Zinnias (detail, central panel), Justin Cooper

The gallery is filled with a wide selection of flower varieties, including specific examples such as Eden Climbing Rose, Dandelions, Black-Eyed Susans and Daisies.

Cooper creates his wildflowers as if assembling Legos. In a method described in his artist statement as first interpreting the various parts of the plant – flowers, buds and leaves – and then rendering them “as discrete  shapes and components,” which are then assembled as parts into the compositions. 

It is a process for creating believable 3D images out of nothing more than lines and planes, not unlike object modeling for video game environments, but with a hand-made analog touch.

The wood burnt drawing and geometry of design are apparent in the finished product. In them, Cooper achieves a result somewhere between Minecraft and Grand Theft Auto 6, that is to say, not clunky, not hyperreal –  but a harmonious in-between –  a  balance of mathematical schematics paired with the colored washes of his flowers on the wood. 

There is something old and something new in them.  Cooper's work would hang as comfortably in a cottage on Walden Pond or a bungalow in Garfield Park.  Or perhaps even a 3D-printed house anywhere in the future. 

For now, they hang in a beautiful display at the newest art museum in Indianapolis, CAMi.

Justin Cooper – Yard Works: Geometric Botanical Studies continues through September 20.

Mark Diekhoff, August 2026

The material used in this article is being used under the fair use provisions of copyright law. The content is being used for educational purposes only, and all rights to the original content are held by their respective copyright owners. We do not claim ownership of any copyrighted material used in this work.

CAMi – An Exciting Expansion and Evolution of Indianapolis Art

The Church (detail) from Kept Secrets: Open Code by Cory Robinson
at Tube Gallery, CAMi

The Doors Open at CAMi

The Contemporary Art Museum of Indianapolis (CAMi) has opened this summer with a broad range of art exhibits in its new building and the adjoining campus facilities.

The debut of the newly expanded and extensively renovated Big Car Collaborative campus in its Garfield Park neighborhood, just blocks south of Fountain Square, was previewed in the Indianapolis Business Journal, the (Franklin) Daily Journal, and The Indianapolis Star earlier this year. 

The entire 5-acre campus, that includes the recently opened 40,000 square-foot CAMi Main building, the adjacent Tube Factory art space (Tube) and Guichelaar Gallery, is tucked on Cruft Street east of Shelby and north of the south boundary of Bean Creek. 

The beautifully designed and landscaped exterior spaces include features and attractions like the Chicken Chapel of Love, Indianapolis Bee Sanctuary and Bean Creek Overlook. Also on that block of Cruft, north of Bean Creek and the art buildings, are 18 affordable-living homes for artists. 

Areas to stroll, relax and explore confront the visitor at every turn on the campus, inside and out.

CAMi Main is home to a range of galleries, activity spaces, artist studios and storefront shops. Unique features of the building's configuration and spaces, some of which has been retained from its original industrial layout, include the large Basile Hall performing arts room, the corner nook for the Big Car Colaborative's WGRT radio station and the O.P.T.I.O.N.A.L space, the quirky cube of an island office of the former building supervisors that has been repurposed as what exactly?  It is an individual surprise for the CAMi visitor to discover.

Sold Ya, Samuel Levi Jones
in the Katharine B Sutphin Gallery in CAMi Main

Many separate gallery rooms, from intimate to large, are contained within CAMI Main and Tube. So numerous one is likely to miss something on a single visit. 

The ambitious, and one assumes, tireless and arduous efforts of Big Car founding collaborators, Jim Walker and Shauta Marsh, along with innumerable fellow travelers, sponsors and donors have resulting in a stunning, diverse and almost hyper multi-purpose venue for the offering and appreciation of arts in the city.    

In experiencing the first iterations of exhibitions, CAMi's unique, cutting-edge was on full display. 

A Sample of the Shows.

As mentioned, there is almost too much to see and do at CAMi to take it all in at once. But you can try.

In CAMi Main's central Jeremy Efroymson Gallery, as covered in an earlier blog here, is the interactive Ivelisse Jimenez installation, Campo de Resonancia.

Nearby is Kept Secrets: Open Code, an exhibition in three parts by Cory Robinson that can be seen in Tube Gallery, located in an adjacent building with Normal Cafe. 

With Kept Secrets, the visitor first encounters The Garden, a series of carved redwood sculptures and light elements in organic shapes that suggest plants and leaves. The interplay of positive and negative space and play of light and shadow create a depth to the  frieze-like presentation of the plants against a green wall. 

The Garden from Kept Secrets: Open Code by Cory Robinson

Across from this sculpture garden, and on either side of the main gallery entrance in The Court sit a pair of throne-like chairs.  With their unusual circular design overall, the beginning glyphs of the artist's CODEX vocabulary are revealed. In the tile work component of the chairs, circles and curving lines repeat asymmetrically, although in a graceful and flowing way.  One throne has predominately pink tile offset with brown, and the other predominately brown offset with pink – together, providing a sort of yin yang balance between the two.

Walking past the thrones and into The Church, in the ambiance and quiet of a darkened room, the visitor will encounter a mixed-media installation comprised of five large, free-hanging, panels of textile artwork. The exhibit manifest that accompanies the display provides some rudimentary explanation for an artwork difficult to explain,

“The Church features five large, tufted rugs installed in a continuous curved sequence, evoking the apse of a cathedral...the designs translate the flat graphic language of the CODEX Series into textile compositions – digitally precise in conception yet softened and humanized  in their yarn-rendered finish.”

Within each large and roughly square ivory-colored rug, a sculptural formation of the artist's CODEX components are distributed each to its own (image top of page). They appear as metallic widgets, even when composed of shag rug. The nameless deities are copper colored and presumably shiny, circular and disc shaped variously like cymbals, hockey pucks, stacked flat plates or vessels. 

In the future we will all be famous for fifteen minutes, as Andy Warhol predicted way before the age of social media. Robinson's CODEX deities seem to allude to as many different religions as there are individual people, as there are combinations of widgets. As many as the combinations of numbers in data centers, in our not too distant future. Metallic godheads, warm and fuzzy, for the depopulated factories of AI. 

Back in CAMi Main, perhaps the most traditional of the contemporary art exhibited in the inaugural shows is From the Collection Of... in the Katharine B Sutphin Gallery. 

Mostly two-dimensional art hanging from the walls make up the eleven works borrowed from the collections of various CAMi donors. 

Bestiary, Katharine B. Sutphin

Two oil on canvas paintings by gallery namesake Katharine B. Sutphin are included, both neo-expressionist in style; Bestiary and Subway Solitude. A modern chaos seems more to be enjoyed than feared in her paintings which possess vibrant color and spontaneous energy.

Sold Ya by Samuel Levi Jones is described as a color flatbite and aquatint on paper (image above). An austere and minimal effect is achieved by the artist with greens and tans and the rectangular formations of regimental and recurring shapes that make up the work.

Additional works in a variety of media including an Untitled hanging fabric, black and thinly vertical by Jesse Robinson.  This piece goes well with the monochrome or minimally colored works in the room; Bigfoot, a cyanotype by Casey Roberts, Venice Notebook, 2001 #8 a lithograph by Richard Serra and Looking for Elsewhere VII, graphite and spray paint on paper by Barb Bondy. 

After Party, Grace by Eunshin Kim

After Party, an oil on canvas painting by Grace Eunshin Kim, Ancestral Spirit Dance #281 by Willis 'Bing' Davis and To See Her Smile a mixed media assemblage by Samuel E. Vazquez round out the artists represented in the show.

Sights and Songs and Place.

Sounds accompany the sights of many of the inaugural exhibits at CAMi, including the video art pieces You're Standing Inside the Instrument: A Score for 19 Buildings, Untitled (m.j. The symptom), and Drafts. 

You're Standing Inside the Instrument is a collaborative piece that paired twenty architects and designers with an equal number of artists. According the exhibit manifest that accompanied the work, the architects each chose a favorite Indianapolis building and from there, the artist would take over, and play some “aspect or aspects of the building as sort of instruments to create  a part of a combined soundscape or sort of a song.”

In CAMi Main's Listen Hear Gallery, a dark room ideal for the presentation of audio-video work, the visitor is surrounded by stationary, restful video images of the chosen buildings, each on a video flatscreen. 

The buildings are mostly familiar icons of the Indianapolis architectural landscape, although a handful are more seldom seen. 

still image from You're Standing Inside the Instrument
by a collaboration of architects and artists

Standing in the dark space of glowing screens, one is also in a surround of soft noises. A lush mix of minimal, industrial and urban sounds. It is not really unease or anxiety that the broadcast layer of music creates. Maybe a slight Kafka-esque  confusion when trying to unravel a bureaucratic babble and make sense of what is being heard. 

Percussive sounds and whistles. Footsteps tap with hammering beats amid a muffled flow of traffic. A vestige of a human parade echoing atop the distant screech of trolley wheels. Plane sound and birds chirping, soft and deep, within the hum.

It is not a happy sound of ribbon-cutting fanfare, rather the ghosts and spirits of the buildings stirring restlessly within stone and steel.  And no words.

There is a sweet spot at the back of the gallery where seemingly all is heard, both close to the ear and buried in the distance – a comforting white noise of societal static – at least for city dwellers.

In that spot it all comes together, each individual note is subsumed into the larger score. It's bricks and mortar breathing. 

In Drafts by Jess Dunn and Sylvia Thomas, another collaboration, but of just two. 

The video piece is a looping cycle through time, a barrage of nostalgia and vintage charm with ever changing images and sounds. A one-way primordial travelogue from eden to pioneer, to civilized, to mechanized, to industrialized, to post whatever we call the present now.

Dunn and Thomas acted as joint researchers, film editors, animators and music composers in the complex assembly of the chronological and captivating video work. The multi-screen projection shows a time compressed history of the vicinity and location of CAMi today. 

A viewer can enter at any moment in the timeline, and if patient, await the work's eventual fulfillment and repeat. 

I was reminded of the iconic short film Powers of Ten by Charles and Ray Eames.  But whereas that film was a picnic blanket romp through macro and then micro space, Drafts is a time-bending stationary hitchhike atop a singular plot of dirt just north of a creek where the viewer is actually standing at that moment.

No spoiler descriptions of the many cascading images and sounds contained in the video will be commented on here. The video work is best experienced by the viewer within the room. 

Both Drafts and You're Standing Inside the Instrument, despite their many and mesmerizing multi-facets, are really quite simple. They invite you into the experience, the history and the song, of the place where you actually are. 

Mark Diekhoff, August 2026

The material used in this article is being used under the fair use provisions of copyright law. The content is being used for educational purposes only, and all rights to the original content are held by their respective copyright owners. We do not claim ownership of any copyrighted material used in this work.

Ivelisse Jimenez – 'Campo de Resonancia' at CAMi

Campo de Resonancia (detail), 2026, Ivelisse Jimenez

A playful installation of hanging painted fields of  color by artist Ivelisse Jimenez, is the first exhibition in the major, and most central, gallery space in the newly established Contemporary Art Museum Indianapolis (“CAMi”). 

The expansive CAMi building, on an enlarged campus adjacent to the earlier and ongoing Big Car and Tube facilities at the site are in a quiet and conveniently located Garfield Park neighborhood, near the Conservatory, just off Shelby Street on the near southside of Indianapolis.

Jimenez, who has lived and worked in New York previously, and now in Puerto Rico, describes her interests, generally, in the exhibition materials that accompany the show, as an exploration of

“...how experience exceeds language, how what is sensed, felt, or intuited often resists being named.” 

The exhibition statement further describes the artist's intentions regarding the name of the piece, her choice of materials and the layout of the installation. 

The title of the piece, translated as Resonant Field, is an installation that has been”built from hand-painted transparent and colored vinyl and reclaimed plastics.”  

Plastics are chosen for a reason, as described,

“The materials are not neutral. Plastics are 'deeply entangled with human survival, convenience, and innovation, yet inseparable from from environmental degradation.'  Jimenez doesn't resolve this contradiction – she works inside it.”

The gallery visitor is invited to enter the “permeable labyrinth” and become a moving vantage point, within the work's tapestry of color. 

The sprawling work that fills the large central Jeremy Efroymson Gallery of CAMi, does indeed resist words of explanation. It is more experience than idea. 

It is an attraction – a ballroom-sized, 3d maze. And as mazes go, it is much more happy and casual as opposed to cornered or claustrophobic.  You can easily imagine a gleeful, family-friendly atmosphere running amok with a good-size, opening-night crowd.

Campo de Resonancia is festive, and a harmony of complimentary hues. There is no free-for-all or clash in the artist's choice and tint of paint – mostly oranges and blue, but some yellow and greens as well. 

Pleasing not only in color, there is a serene organization to the right angles and straight lines of the hanging installation. The overall rectangular geometry is amplified by Jimenez painting additional smaller rectangular areas on some of the plastic sheets.   

Some of the delicate panels, that sway and move as one walks around them, have the further decoration of large overlaying brushstrokes, and some are mottled with a haphazard and organic distribution of markings that could either be related to a prior patina from an industrial use or perhaps from any of a number of techniques by the artist to vary the surface effects. 

Some panels are more transparent and allow an effect of layered color and texture when moving through the work.

Overall, in interacting with the installation, there is no feeling at all that you might be looking at or walking through reclaimed refuse. You might think of shower curtains, just because of the size of the sheets and their colorful plastic, and the fact that they are there hanging in front of your face.  But ideas of waste and of landfill do not really come to mind.  

There has been a transformation.

The Sprawl of Modernity.

It might be that earlier in the artist's career, her materials' origination as scrap and refuse were more front and center and on display. 

Jimenez participated in the 2004 exhibition None of the Above, which was a group show of younger Puerto Rican artists working in non-traditional media. 

Held at the Real Art Ways gallery ('RAW') in Hartford Connecticut, the show was covered in the (Connecticut) Record-Journal newspaper on April 25, 2004, in an article by Ralph Hohman. 

A photograph of a mixed media piece installed in a gallery corner on two walls by Jimenez, Ten con Ten #2, accompanied the article.   

Ten con Ten #2, Ivelisse Jimenez

This piece is more obviously an amalgam of found objects and scrap items of plastic than the artist's current installation at CAMi. 

Although difficult to know for certain from just a newspaper photo, some of the plastic components seem distressed and stained by an earlier industrial use, and appear taped together and painted, and dotted with rods projecting through the plastic into the wall. 

We see the beginning of a sprawling effect of the work moving from an original two-dimensional center out toward the edge and beyond.  In this case, onto an adjacent wall, and with the rods, projecting into three-dimensional space.

A few years later, Jimenez would pair with artist Lorri Ott in the two-person show Description Without a Place.  

The (Cleveland) Plain Dealer reported on the artist's methods and motives on March 14, 2008. The article indicated that according to her web site, Jimenez,

“...builds layered constructions  on wall surfaces to 'deal with the idea of simultaneity and contradiction.' ” 

Elsewhere in the same paper on the same day, writer Dan Tranberg previews Jimenez' exhibition in general terms,

“Over in Cleveland's Tremont neighborhood, a new two-person show, Ivelisse Jimenez and Lorri Ott: Description Without a Place...will...kick off...today at Exit (a gallery space)...

Both artists explore the idea of applying painterly sensibilities to three-dimensional constructions using a wide variety of found and manufactured materials...

Jimenez taught art at New York University until 2006, when she joined the faculty at the University of Puerto Rico.”

A full review of the show by the same writer would appear in the Plain Dealer two seeks later, on March 28, and include a photo of Jimenez's Ten con Ten 03exit. 

Ten con Ten 03exit, Ivelisse Jimenez

Tranberg's observations on the historical vein of the work in the show are relevant to Jimenez' current installation in Indianapolis,

“From the mid-1960s on, many artists have explored the elastic boundaries of painting as a unique form by abandoning its most obvious conventions.

Traditional materials such as canvas and rectangular wooden stretchers were among the first to go. More recently, like-minded 'painters' have made use of an array of commercially manufactured materials such as vinyl and acrylic glass in lieu of paint.

In some ways, by stripping away material conventions, these artists are homing in on fundamental conceptual and experimental aspects of painting.”

He continues by discussing Jimenez in particular,

“Jimenez...produces large-scale wall-hung installations that use notions of abstract painting as points of departure.

Variously colored sheets of translucent plastic are cut out to create most of the shapes in her four works in the show. Sheets of frosted plastic veil some areas, blurring and obscuring shapes below.

The optical effects of the configurations...often arranged in loose grid formations, recall a long list of early abstract painters, most notable Hans Hoffman, famous for visually pushing and pulling space with his use of brightly colored rectangles.

Freed as they are from the confines of rectangular canvases, Jimenez's works become actively engaged with the physical space of the gallery (and consequently with viewers)...

In a sense, they are like abstract paintings that have escaped from the two-dimensional realm.”

In 2010, the ideas of abstraction's infiltration into space seem to continue for Jimenez in her solo show at Diana Lowenstein Fine Arts in Miami. A preview description for the exhibition Blind Enough to See  in the March 18, Miami Herald, reads,

“Contrasted with the traditional considerations that the abstract is a negation of space, this body of work by Ivelisse Jimenez reflects upon both the absence and exteriority (the outside) as presences (as opposed to negations).”

Finally, the CAMi exhibition card that accompanies the show depicts the Jimenez wall work, also called Resonant Field, created in 2025. 

It seems a continuation of the wall constructions and installations of the artist's 10 con 10 series. Layers of plastic and industrial material such as vinyl tarps and tape, and paint. The work has irregular outward edges, although, by and large, it is made of  geometric and rectangular forms. It also has the infiltrating effect of reaching round the corner to start on a new wall.

The artist discusses plastics that wash ashore from the ocean onto the beaches of her current island home of Puerto Rico. 

There is something inevitable, something ceaseless and tireless, something restless in the push and pull of tides.

Via her recycling, throwaway raw materials are changed and ultimately transformed.

Jimenez has recycled and transformed a bit of her world, from painting and its two-dimensions to three. From surface to multi-layered and hanging in an ever expanding space. Somehow, she seems to achieve a new level of resonance with each new expanding reach. 

From the reclamation of trash from a seashore to an artwork on a gallery wall. From an artwork on a gallery wall to one intruding into the space of a gallery visitor. An now at CAMi, to gallery visitors, strolling amid the happy hallways of her work. 

Reaction to Campo de Resonancia is not easily put into words. What one feels or has a sense of is indeed more intuition than explanation. 

Of things that wash up on the beach, perhaps driftwood, as opposed to seashells, is an apt metaphor for the work of Jimenez.  Broken trees bleached and made more elegant by the relentless action of water and wave. 

Mark Diekhoff, August 2026

The material used in this article is being used under the fair use provisions of copyright law. The content is being used for educational purposes only, and all rights to the original content are held by their respective copyright owners. We do not claim ownership of any copyrighted material used in this work.