Kerry Stuart Coppin - Materia Obscura/Dark Matter

On the Work of Kerry Stuart Coppin and Materia Oscura / Dark Matter:

For the past several years, a genre of art has arisen in American Fine Arts and in photography in particular, which explores personal and group identity production, travel, and the search for personal roots. I believe that is due, at least in part, as a collective socio-psychological response to the uncertainty of the new millennium and the increasing pace of globalization, a disquieting threat to the very fundamentals of our singularity and uniqueness. On the far right, we find a global social movement of fundamental conservatives whose agenda is to stop or slow the pace of this global process. On the other, an intellectual left that embraces change and looks forward to its challenges and shifting cultures.

Within this complex discourse, Kerry Stuart Coppin urges us to consider the possibilities to come, and the changes that have already over taken us. Without any of the sentimentality that often accompanies these considerations, the work of Coppin, a unique blend of social documentary and fine art, pushes beyond the popular frameworks by situating his visual thesis with the emerging constructs of trans-nationalism. Refined and elegant, we are pressed to consider the formation of a trans-Atlantic Black African identity, encompassing North America, the Caribbean, and West Africa. Within technologically superior imaging, we are hard pressed to identify the location of any subject, but rather recognize the non-specific and eerie similarity of visual prompts. It is a moment in time and space, frozen and captured for us to ponder its banality on the one hand and the deep metaphorical meaning and its prophetic riddle on the other.

Like the stunning image of a van with painted dragon visually intersected by a steel girder, we are left to consider that our once discreet and culturally separate spaces are merging to a single human global creation where parallel or separate realities no longer exist. Rather Kerry Coppin avoids riding the tides of fast pace travel, integrated economies, technology and instantaneous responses, and urges us to consider the basic facts, the common bonds, the similarity of experience…. our humanity.

Craig G. Centrie, Ph.D.
Director and Curator
El Museo Francisco Oller y Diego Rivera
Buffalo, New York
www.africanimagery.com