Kevin Cooley and Phillip Andrew Lewis at Pierogi

KEVIN COOLEY and
PHILLIP ANDREW LEWIS

Gallery 2
3 April – 3 May, 2015
Opening Reception:
Friday, 3 April. 7-9pm

Takeoffs Runway 13, JFK
Kevin Cooley

Nachtfluge, German for “Night Flight” is a series of videos and photographs that turn the urban experience of living under busy flight paths into a visual representation of the longing for transformation embodied in the action of getting on a plane and being transported elsewhere. The imagery, created by organically layering the video footage of commercial airplanes taking off, allows the streaks formed by their landing and navigation lighting to build up over time and draw pathways across the sky. In videos condensed from hours of footage, and long exposure nighttime photographs lasting up to several hours, the light paths construct a single image capturing commercial airplanes traversing the night skies, each line represents the amount of time it takes a commercial flight to pass through the frame. As these paths track through the night sky, each one an escape from, or a plunge into our increasingly interconnected world, highlights the impact of all of air transportation on the natural environment.

We Can Break Through
Kevin Cooley and Phillip Andrew Lewis

A pair of standard box fans connected to a single common powerstrip are simultaneously activated. These coexisting machines morph from inert mechanical objects to dancing, dueling entities that ultimately bring about their own demise.

Kevin Cooley and Phillip Andrew Lewis collaborative work combines their mutual interests in using everyday objects to reveal unexpected and surprising situations found in everyday life. Drawing upon history, science, philosophy and cultural theory, our work is an extensive examination of binary oppositions, and explores possibilities of the amorphous and the anthropomorphized in a series of multidisciplinary works including photos, videos, installations, and sculptural works.  A shared fascination with such natural occurrences and their sometimes-unexpected intersections with human culture not only inform our practice, but often take the work in unexpected, yet related directions.