Preview
Description
Reagan Cosper (b. 1998) is a St. Petersburg-based multimedia Contemporary artist and curator who has organized and participated in art exhibitions throughout the Tampa Bay area. Cosper’s involvement in art organizing began as a student in the University of South Florida when she was active in connecting the campus to the regional arts community, advocating for greater public art presence, and helping to organize art events. During these efforts she became an early part of the leadership of the St. Petersburg campus’ first student art club, The Collection, and also worked with university officials to launch art projects and expand the presence of the arts on campus. After graduating she continued to organize grassroots art events that provide platforms for a diverse range of artists from various backgrounds and art mediums. She has also co-founded the Two Headed Gallery project in Downtown St. Petersburg and served as co-host for the WMAS Art Talks podcast.
As an artist, Cosper works primarily in the mediums of painting, photography, literature, and digital art. This piece, Suspended in Flight (2022), is part of an ongoing series of introspective works in which Cosper explores the cross-media relation between word and form by utilizing a unique creative process that creates links between written and visual poetry. With Suspended in Flight, Cosper began with painting the piece first and then created the poem afterwards whereas in other works the poem precedes and inspires the painting. In either scenario, the companion painting and poems ultimately form a unified conceptual work of seen and unseen images, feelings, and associations.
Suspended in Flight captures several signature elements of her art, including narrative symbolism, an emphasis on color, the use of partial or abstracted self portraits. Visually, it draws influence from each of her greatest recurring inspirations (René Magritte, Frida Kahlo, and Piet Mondrian) to form Cosper’s aesthetic foundation. Cosper also utilizes Surrealist imagery and ambiguous symbols—including animals, X-rays, dice, and distorted bodies—to create segmented vignettes of enigmatic moodscapes and windows into the inner worlds of herself and others.
To further reinforce the personal nature of the piece, it also incorporates quilting border designs inspired by the quilting traditions of her grandmother and mother, connecting her work to the continuity of her family, as well as the history of women’s craft art traditions at large. This is one of Cosper’s early pieces to feature the motif, which is further employed in subsequent larger scale works, therefore making Suspended in Flight significant as a transitional piece in Cosper’s body of work.
Accompanying poem:
Embracing the help.
It felt I was always reaching,
Only luck would have it,
That you would save me.
Making me as light as your feathers
Time passed waiting for you,
I watched my favorite things die.
You were worth the wait,
I am trying to convince myself of that at least.
Date Digital
2026
Date Original
2022
Format
Acrylic on canvas