Justin Cooper-Yard Works: Geometric Botanical Studies

August 7 — September 20, 2026 | Katharine B Sutphin Gallery | CAMi

Yard Works: Geometric Botanical Studies

This collection continues a series Justin Cooper began in 2019, translating the plants, wildlife, and flowers found in his backyard and throughout Indianapolis's Garfield Park neighborhood into geometric form. The current body of work expands that vocabulary to include houseplants and native Indiana wildflowers. This selection features multi-panel pieces built around botanical patterns that trace the rhythm of successive growing seasons — each flower returning year after year, its patterns shifting slightly each time, resilient in its adaptation.

Individual flowers, buds, and leaves are interpreted, digitally rendered, and cataloged as discrete shapes and components, then reassembled into new compositions. The resulting geometric abstractions reflect both the pace of digital growth and the human distortion of the natural environment.

Birch wood panels serve as the base for these pieces, chosen for their warmth and the natural luminosity of the grain. Each digital design is transferred to the wood in graphite, then burned directly into the panel with a wood-burning tool. The panel is sanded and sealed with shellac, preserving a glossy layer between the grain and the oil paint to follow. Thin oil glazes are then built up in layers, allowing light to pass through, strike the luminous wood beneath, and bounce back to the viewer — recalling the vibrancy of the subject's living form. Together, the wood panel, the dark burned lines, and the translucent glazing are meant to evoke stained glass, ceramic tile, and wood inlay — art forms that have long inspired the development of this series.

About the artist
Justin Cooper is an Indianapolis native who has worked as an artist for over 25 years, most of that time as a studio artist. Independently developing his artistic voice while forming relationships with fellow artists — through studios at the Murphy Art Center, Wheeler Arts Community, and as an artist in residence in Big Car Collaborative's Artist and Public Life Residency — has been central to his evolution as an artist.

In the studio, Cooper works across multiple series simultaneously, with individual pieces eventually organized into cohesive bodies of work. He has long been drawn to learning new mediums and techniques as a way of expanding his visual language, and in recent years has developed a growing interest in large-scale murals and public art — experimenting with scale and composition while considering how a piece will read from different distances, and how its placement and surrounding context shape its meaning.

Cooper's work is deeply influenced by observation of the natural world and by his interest in art history and architecture. Reflecting the relationship between humans and nature is fundamental to his practice, and he is especially drawn to the geometric formations, patterns, and structural arrangements found in the natural world. Over the past several years, his work has centered on interpreting nature and organic forms through geometric abstraction, often using isometric geometry to create moments where an object reads as both concave and convex — a device he uses to challenge depth perception and suggest multiple ways of seeing a single subject.

His most recent series turns this approach toward the plants and flowers of his own yard and Garfield Park neighborhood — a body of work explored in depth in the accompanying artist statement.