About Coorain.

Coorain is simultaneously enrolled at Tufts University and the School of the Museum of Fine Arts. He’s pretty sure he doesn’t know what to do, but it might involve printmaking, drawing, and thinking really hard.

Here is an artist’s statement of sorts:

My work revolves around ideas of reproduction and authenticity: hence the medium I find myself most comfortable with is collage. Printmaking and photography are other important aspects to my studio practice, but I tend to transform them into collage somehow. I find film to be a muse, both in providing images and in my exploration of theory. In these media, it is impossible to have an “authentic” artwork- in printmaking and film, the inherent reproduction destroys the “aura” of specific artwork. With collage, the use of found materials denies the pure genius of a single artist.

In my work I often try to explore where theory meets everyday life and where it doesn’t. Many of my influences come from outside the world of visual artists and in the world of philosophers, and yet at the same time of the art world. In Beyond the Brillo Box, Arthur Danto argues that art has become philosophy. In my studies at Tufts and in my free time, I spend time reading from the standard pantheon of great thinkers, but have spent the most time with Ludwig Wittgenstein, Isaac Newton, and Stanley Cavell. I find Adriane Piper and David Lynch particularly inspiring because they have straddle the line between art and thought in particularly interesting ways. Lynch’s films in particular, as they often deal with the isolation and distance I often feel in contemporary America. He also pays some homage to an America that no longer exists, which also plays into my interests in nostalgia.

Collection is integral to my work- I find that compulsively hoarding important objects both reflects the capitalist system in which I operate, but also the excess in which is the art world itself. Our culture prizes the material and for me, the most pertinent way to deal with that is to fully participate, almost compulsively. While this is not entirely obvious in my finished work, it shows up in most of my work. I view my sketchbooks even as collections of unfinished ideas and work in progress. My Lady Parts series is the result of collecting forms taken from pinups as a way of considering the figure as a material. The forms are cut out of contact paper, which is directly from the domestic sphere that females are placed in and have allegedly been freed them from.

In my exploration of materials, books interest me, both as modes of production, as in the reuse of a book as an art object, but also a mode presentation, as in the case of an “original” book. A book to me is very much like a film made into a physical object. Some of my work has dissected found books and made them into new objects, such as hollowing them out. By destroying the original text and replacing it, I’m working with the idea of books as important entities, but I find that the original authors intent may have been off. Today this is clearer, as books disappear from the cultural lexicon. To make a book today is to say that the contents are important enough to warrant a physical manifestation.

Nostalgia, pastiche, and distance play a large role in my work as well. I’m fascinated by the ability of our culture to create nostalgia for something we’re experiencing for the first time. I have an extensive collection of snapshot photographs, both my own and many culled from garage sales. The willingness of people to part with what is presumably personal history is both inexplicable and fascinating to me. The inherent nostalgia I find in these images fuels my drawing and much of my sketchbook. The painting quality of Luc Tuyman has heavily influenced how I draw- he works extensively from photographs, as do I. I think that to some extent the nostalgia in my work is real, but at the same time, it can’t be. Part of what I’m working out is the conflation between pastiche and nostalgia.

Jean Baudrillard has had a great impact on my work. An animation I created in response to his work used printed paper to create a plane of abstract shapes, which, while creating a world of movement, was really the same image repeat ad nauseum, just as Baudrillard claims culture is now repeating the same ideas (which is somewhat ironic, as Baudrillard inspire a previous generation of artists; thus, I am completely his prophecy and making him part of that repetition). The animation reveals the images as part of a 2 dimensional plain as the paper crumples, which also reflects dissatisfaction with the current system and the image themselves. When the background is revealed, the illusion of the animation as its own world is destroyed. It is the product of a studio, but at the same time, it is a reproduction.