Tale of Two Cities

Charlie Cooper is a conceptual artist whose practice interrogates the porous boundaries between memory, materiality, and the systems that shape contemporary life. Working across installation, video, and found-object assemblage, Cooper constructs quiet, often unsettling environments that invite viewers to reconsider the everyday objects and rituals they take for granted. Self-taught and working outside traditional institutional frameworks, Cooper draws on archival research, personal correspondence, and the detritus of obsolete technologies — repurposed not as nostalgia, but as evidence of how meaning erodes and reconstitutes itself over time. The choice to work independently is itself part of the practice: a deliberate refusal of the credentialing systems that so often determine which voices enter the conversation. Recent projects have explored themes of inherited silence, bureaucratic intimacy, and the architecture of waiting. Cooper's work tends toward the patient and the exacting, favoring slow accumulation over spectacle, and trusting viewers to sit with ambiguity rather than resolve it. Cooper lives and works in Seattle, Washington, where the region's particular relationship to weather, water, and quiet has become an increasingly central influence on the work. Current projects include a long-term investigation into the language of lost objects.