Color Sadness Spectrum
On 28 September, 2024
Exhibition + a reading of Mary Ruefle’s color poems by Cooper Lovano
And a reading by artist Lauryn Youden
Color Sadness Spectrum is an exhibition by Cooper Lovano composed of sculptural adaptations of poems by American Poet Laureate Mary Ruefle (My Private Property, 2017), which categorize types of sadness into different colors.
The sculptures are visual adaptations of Ruefle’s Color Sadness poems, seeking to match the emotional tone of each poem. The sculptures use high-resolution Adobe Stock images clipped to white-enameled copper pipe structures, recalling heating and plumbing pipes. The combination of realistic imagery within structures associated with construction and utility creates an unsettling surrealism: scenes float into clarity out of familiar backdrops.
The structures are made specifically for the Co-Making Matters space and fitted to window dimensions as displays. The well-lit stock images mirror the specificity and clarity of Ruefle’s poems, where each color of sadness is defined by hyper-specific situations (e.g., ‘an orange balloon drifting over snow-capped mountains’). The stock images are clipped to copper pipe structures built with LED tube lighting, blending with the exposed construction bungalows of Haus der Statistik to enhance the surrealism.
While others — Goethe, Albers, Kandinsky — have linked colors to emotions, Ruefle’s approach in Color Sadness poems avoids theoretical explanations. Instead, she characterizes each color through vivid personal images, from the mundane (‘the sadness of all things left overnight in the oven’) to the extraordinary (‘an orange balloon drifting over snow-capped mountains’). Her deeply personal examples disavow universal categories, suggesting these lists are more about understanding each other’s interior worlds than defining universal emotions.