BROOKLYN, NY.- Xiao Fu's installation Pixel World was originally shown as part of Home Improvement, a group show of outdoor sculpture curated by Deborah Brown and Lesley Heller on Rock Street for Bushwick Open Studios 2015. For her exhibition at STE, Fu has reconfigured the work to respond to an indoor gallery space. Fu creates works that are mainly concerned with her personal observations about the urban experience. Fu responds to experiences and perceptions unique to densely populated urban settings, such as a sense of crowded loneliness and the resulting psychological distance between people in close physical proximity. As an international artist living in New York City, she often feels dislocation and stress due to cultural differences, the scale of the architectural surroundings and the crowded conditions of daily life that create a metaphorical and literal wall around her. In response to these sensations, Fu minimizes the cityscape in her work to simple geometric forms to present how she sees the urban environment and the relationship between its people, spaces and structures. The goal is to allow a viewer the opportunity to observe contemporary social constructs from a distance, providing them with a new perspective.

The work of Justin Cooper is located in liminal spaces and positions, dangling precariously between the hinged and unhinged. The artist examines the ways that lines delineate space, create thresholds and open up thin areas where things can exist for a brief moment without definition. A relentless cross-pollination of media within the artist's practice marks a restless search for these lines in formal and conceptual manifestations. Whether drawn, spoken or objectified, the lines contain an energy that is both earnest and utterly deadpan. Mundane materials carve out a straight-faced existence alongside notions of the sublime, simultaneously celebrating and canceling out the other. Abstract images and recognizable objects are subverted and repositioned as unconscious signs to form a blurred language in which unchained signifiers playfully resist coherent translation. Cooper seeks unstable relationships that hover between the comedic and the disturbing according to circumstance. Objects, gestures, drawings, images and videos are defamiliarized and look to a self-contained context for definition. The artist is fascinated by incongruent moves that cause a mental misfire, a visual glitch or a double-take. The goal a visual and conceptual representation of the spark that is created in these unstable situations.

Xiao Fu is a Chinese artist currently living and working in Brooklyn, NY. She received her BFA from Luxun Academy of Fine Arts, Shenyang, China, and MFA in Sculpture at Academy of Art University, San Francisco, CA. Fu's experiences visiting and living in a variety of cultures has given her an appreciation for being open to the complexities found in diverse communities. Her journeys continue to impact and influence the imagery she employs in her works.

Justin Cooper is a New York based artist and performer who utilizes comedic fragments to create large scale installations, sculptures, videos and performances. By twisting the everyday into weirder and more ambiguous shapes, Cooper seeks to root out deeper psychological truths and provide deadpan commentary on our contemporary world. Cooper's work is constantly refolding back on itself, and seeks to playfully disrupt the viewer's experience with the unexpected, shifting without warning from highly formal to hilariously unhinged. He was born and raised in Tulsa, OK, and received his MFA in sculpture from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2005. He attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in 2007 and recently completed the residency program at Art Omi. Cooper has exhibited and performed extensively nationally and internationally including New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Hong Kong, Sweden, Mexico and Berlin.