OCHI is pleased to present The View from Upstairs, an exhibition of new paintings by Brooklyn-based artist Cooper Cox. This exhibition marks Cox’s second solo presentation with the gallery. The View from Upstairs will be presented at OCHI, located at 605 N. Western Avenue in Los Angeles, California, from February 24 through April 4, 2026. An opening reception will be held on Tuesday, February 24 from 5:00 - 8:00 PM PDT.
The View from Upstairs presents a new body of paintings that examine how imagery, particularly landscape, is imagined, mediated, and experienced. Created upstairs at OCHI Idaho, Cox painted while looking out at the same mountain range that shaped his early visual memory growing up in Idaho. This sustained vantage point, both present and remembered, grounds the exhibition’s exploration of how place is filtered through time, technology, and personal history.
The exhibition gathers scenes translated from speculative, AI-assisted images into oil paint, collapsing distinctions between observed nature and constructed representation. These landscapes emerge from viewpoints that feel at once familiar and unattainable, shaped by memory, desire, and technological intervention rather than direct documentation. Historical traditions of landscape painting quietly structure the work, serving as a visual foundation rather than a fixed model, as depictions of nature are reactivated through contemporary tools.
In this context, digital processes function not as replacements for observation but as speculative devices—means of exploring landscapes that may be distant, altered, or utterly inaccessible. By translating these constructed environments into paint, The View from Upstairs proposes nature and memory as actively shaped through imagination and mediation, suggesting that the environments with which we surround ourselves are as much invented as they are remembered.
