The forest has always been the place where the rules change. Not the manicured garden, not the park, but the genuine forest: the one where the path runs out and the light comes through in pieces and the things that live there do not particularly care whether they are observed or understood. Every culture that has ever told stories has told them in the forest. It is where you go to become lost, and where being lost turns out, eventually, to be the point.

The approximately 150 works that filled 311 Gallery across September 2024 were made from that understanding. Trees appear across dozens of panels, each one its own complete world: pale trees, burning trees, moon trees, trees in frost and in full leaf, trees that seem to be dreaming and trees that seem to be watching. They are not landscape. They are presences, each one distinct, each one carrying the particular quality of something that has been looked at long enough to become itself rather than a category. Among them move the other inhabitants of this world: cats in windows, cats in pursuit, cats in love, cats conducting tea parties and chasing things only they can see. Peacocks spread their geometry. A phoenix rises. A raven sits with the self-possession of a bird that has read the poem written about it and found the assessment fair. Lovers appear in every season. Angels stretch across narrow vertical canvases, their forms elongated to the point of abstraction, reaching toward something at the top of the panel that the panel does not contain.

What holds all of it together is not a theme so much as a temperature. The forest is not a metaphor in these works. It is a condition, the state in which the imagination operates when it has been given sufficient room and sufficient quiet and sufficient permission to follow whatever appears at the edge of the path. The density of the work, the sheer number of pieces and the range of subjects they address, produces in the gallery the particular atmosphere of the forest itself: everywhere you look there is something, and the something repays attention, and beyond it there is something else.

311 Gallery had presented Dreamland the previous month, and the appetite for what Cooley's work offers had not diminished when And into the Forest... opened in September. If anything the new exhibition extended the territory the earlier one had mapped, adding depth to a world that the gallery's audience had only recently begun to explore. The two shows were not planned as a sequence, but the forest has its own logic about what arrives when, and the work arrived when the room was ready for it.