Not every exhibition asks to be sought out. Dreamland: Creatures and Curiosities was presented in the public corridors of Chapel Hill Town Hall as part of the Town's Community Arts and Culture Public Spaces program, a setting where the work became part of daily life rather than a destination apart from it. People arrived on ordinary business, to pay a bill, attend a meeting, pass through on their way somewhere else, and found themselves in the company of something that had not been there the day before and that did not particularly require them to know what to make of it. That kind of encounter, unscheduled and unmediated, is one that galleries and museums cannot manufacture. It belongs exclusively to work that has been placed where life actually happens.

The works selected for this presentation drew from the creatures and beings that have populated Cooley's practice across three decades. Hybrid animals and fantastical forms, figures that belong to folklore and to personal mythology in equal measure, cats in elaborate costume, a white horse crossing a golden field, densely inhabited gardens where human and animal forms exist in easy and unexplained proximity. These are images that carry their own internal world with them wherever they go, and in the corridors of a public building they carried it with particular directness, the vivid color and scale of the work pressing against the functional architecture of the setting in a way that made both the art and the building more fully themselves by contrast.

There is something appropriate about work rooted in the creatures of dream and mythology finding its way into the spaces of civic life. The beings that have always inhabited the margins of the visible world, appearing at thresholds and in transitional spaces, were here placed in exactly that kind of liminal territory: a public corridor that is neither fully inside nor fully outside, neither a private space nor a purely formal one, but the kind of in-between place where unexpected encounters have always been most likely to occur. Visitors who had no particular relationship to contemporary art encountered these works without the apparatus of the gallery visit, without wall texts or opening receptions or the quiet pressure of the white cube, and found them on their own terms entirely.

Dreamland: Creatures and Curiosities was sponsored by the Town of Chapel Hill, an acknowledgment that the work belonged in the public life of the community as naturally as it had belonged in the galleries and museums and department store exhibition spaces it had occupied across thirty years and multiple continents.