Oakland-based Alika Cooper's portraits, in gouache and oil, are intense, psychological, and difficult. Working with film stills taken from American movies released between 1950 and 1980, Cooper takes a “hyper-glamorized” image of femininity, and renders it grotesque. Her landscapes, meanwhile, are landscapes of poverty, each image carrying a threat, a sense of potential disruption, of psychic, or perhaps even social, unrest.

Born in Guam, Cooper received her M.F.A. from the California College of Arts in 2005. Her work has appeared at the LightBox and Black Market galleries in Los Angeles, at the Aiden Savoy, Paul Morris, and Jen Bekman galleries in New York City, at the Lobot Gallery in Oakland, and at Triple Base, 111 Minna, and Varnish galleries in San Francisco. Her illustrations frequently appear in national publications, such as the New York Times Sunday Magazine. This is her first solo exhibition.