When Cooley returned to the United States after more than thirty years in Japan, he brought Dreamland with him. The exhibition crossed the Pacific to 311 Gallery in Raleigh, arriving not as something foreign finding new ground but as something coming home, the work settling into the city where Cooley now lives with the ease of things that have always known where they belong.

311 Gallery suited the exhibition in the way that certain spaces suit certain bodies of work, not by being neutral but by having character of their own. Long hallways carried paintings across their full length, the works lining both sides and drawing visitors forward through the space while rooms opened off at intervals on either side, the exhibition spilling into each one and pulling the eye in multiple directions simultaneously. Moving through the gallery was to move through the Dreamland world the way you move through an actual dream, one space opening onto another, the logic of the whole felt rather than mapped, each turn revealing something that extended and complicated what had come before without resolving it.

The works on show drew from across the full range of the practice. A newer series of cat paintings, bold and richly costumed, found their place within the Dreamland universe alongside works that had been traveling far longer, portraits of hybrid beings, landscapes that follow their own internal geography, numbers moving through compositions like a current running just beneath the surface of everything. The large scale of the gallery gave each work room to breathe and be encountered on its own terms, the long hallways creating a different kind of viewing experience from the more concentrated installations the exhibition had occupied elsewhere, the works accumulating their effect gradually as visitors moved through the space rather than all at once.

Cooley has spoken of his practice as the product of webs, connections made across time and geography between people, places, ideas and images that seem unrelated until the thread between them becomes visible. The Raleigh presentation was another strand in that web: the work that had been built across three decades and two continents finding its way to the city where the next chapter of the practice is being written, the distance between where the work came from and where it now hangs reduced, for the first time, to almost nothing.