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Susan Cofer: Absence of Certainty

Apr 24, 2010 - Jul 3, 2010
10am - 5pm

“Being well into a certain age I find myself aiming for uncertainty, relinquishing the comfort of a well-used composition, shifting my point of view. These drawings have been taking me somewhere horizontal. Horizontals often imply landscapes. Landscapes imply an absence of certainty. They are precarious. They change with the light, with seasons, with circumstances beyond our control. They have no apparent beginnings. They end out of our sight. Maybe this open endedness is just what I need at this stage of life. Maybe this precariousness reflects the world we live in today.”

– Susan Cofer

“I met Susan Cofer many years ago when our children attended the First Montessori School in Atlanta. We were both practicing artists at the time, but I remember a day when we were waiting in the carpool line and she came to my car window and asked, “How do you do it…manage motherhood and a career as an artist?” That question and that day began a long and meaningful friendship between us. As our lives took their various turns and directions, long periods of time would pass between conversations but we seemed destined to continue periodically to have intense conversations about art and our own work in particular.

Through the years I have never known another artist as passionate as Cofer or as intent on finding the answers to the questions of how and why some of us have this insatiable need to communicate through art.  She looked for the answer of how in the human act of mark making — in the landscape, in the tiny seed pod in nature, in the paper on which she drew and manipulated by tearing the edges, in writings and the art works of others, and in the way that art was presented. She has worked steadily, mounted numerous solo exhibitions and continued working with a fierce determination to communicate by producing drawings that are intelligent and packed with multiple layers of meaning. However, with this latest body of work, asking the questions doesn’t seem to be as important as before. There seems to be within Susan a quiet resolve that not knowing and uncertainly is okay. Perhaps the awareness and acceptance of uncertainly is part of the wisdom that we acquire as we reach a time in our lives when we have lived long enough to have a history of experiences that gives us knowledge and insight but not the certainty that we sought in our youth.

This exhibition came about during one of our conversations surrounding the work of Richard Devore, a ceramic artist in her personal collection. She lent two works by Devore to the MOCA GA exhibition CLAY in 2003.  She talked with passion about the curves and forms of his ceramic sculpture in such a way that I began to see a relationship in his work to the forms in her own drawings — his forms coming out of the molding of the clay and hers coming forth from the obsessive vertical line markings in her drawings. When she discovered his work, it must have been very rewarding for her to have found someone whose art communicated with hers. In the beginning we talked about a two person show with Devore but after several years of planning and scheduling it became important to me to show her new work in a solo exhibition.

I believe Cofer is on the verge of a major shift in her work. The most recent drawings have become more abstract with much less reference to form and landscape. They seem as though they could expand indefinitely in much the same way that her approach to her work is expanding by letting the work evolve without questioning. In this exhibition, one can see the beginnings of this evolution in Saultopaul (Plate I), an earlier drawing which she continued to work on from 2003 – 2008. In this work, the viewer witnesses the beginnings of abstraction that are found in her most recent work and especially in Absence of Certainty, 2010 (Plate VIII). In Saultopaul there is an obvious landscape with a horizon line and a sky area that seems to repeat the foreground. This repetition confuses the viewer and manipulates the planes of the picture by receding and coming forward in regular pattern. The resulting image begins to flatten and gives us a hint of how her work would evolve into more abstraction two years later.

It is interesting to note the uncertainty of direction from 2008 through early 2009.  In After Ghiberti, 2008 (Plate II), Cofer continued to look for inspiration in composition and form; but in the same year she explored the landscape once again in The Grove Fall, 2008 – 2009 (Plate III). However, in Levavi Oculus, 2009 (Plate IV), we again observe a return to carving out form from the picture plane but this time in relation to the landscape.

With the last four drawings in this catalogue, (Plate V through Plate VIII) Cofer has hit a rhythm in her landscapes, but she has allowed them to morph into abstraction which makes them very different from her older work. These drawings show a decisive deliberateness of stroke – even as the pencil marks become much more faint and delicate. Instead of absence of certainty, the title she gave her exhibition, these drawings show the confidence and certainty of mark-making of a master draftsman.

With this latest work, Cofer is thinking differently. Her acceptance of the uncertain is hopefully allowing her the freedom to revel in the joy of making exquisite drawings. I am looking forward to what comes next.”

  – Annette Cone-Skelton

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