Jamie Cooper: Levelling Up

The exhibition ‘Levelling Up’ by Jamie Cooper at Fruitmarket Gallery critiques consumerism and capitalism through transformed corporate symbols, blending art, sound, and immersive visuals for a reflective experience.

Fruitmarket Gallery, Edinburgh: 13.12.25-18.01.26

I was delighted to attend the opening of a new exhibition by my good friend and frequent collaborator, Jamie Cooper. Levelling Up opened at the Fruitmarket Gallery in Edinburgh on Friday 12 December and explores the existential crisis faced by citizen consumers in late capitalist Britain.

Cooper draws on the hollow and endlessly recycled language of political promise, combining it with the spectacle and alienation inherent in video gaming. The result is an imaginary world populated by the semiotics of consumption, one that strongly recalls Guy Debord’s account of the spectacle as not merely a collection of images, but a social relation mediated by images. In this sense, Levelling Up does not simply represent spectacle, but actively stages it, implicating the viewer within a system where desire, identity, and political agency are increasingly organised through visual and symbolic consumption.

Illuminated signs inhabit the gallery space. They oscillate ambiguously between shop signage and video game characters, and the environment they create feels closer to an illicit early 1990s rave venue than a conventional white cube. White discs are scattered across the floor, resembling pills or oversized coins, each emblazoned with comments and observations that will be instantly recognisable to a generation shaped by austerity. The deconstructed party atmosphere is reinforced by club like music and VJ style video works by the Glasgow based artist John Beagles.

The dystopian collapse of the welfare system, alongside allusions to futures deferred or foreclosed as consumers are drawn ever deeper into cycles of debt, is further underscored by the inclusion of a soundtrack that I produced for the exhibition. This dystopian, deconstructed echo of a club culture long since past was included by Jamie as a contrasting counterpoint to the playful illuminated characters. This audio layer adds an additional a/tonal register to what Cooper describes as the way ‘generations of meaning have been distilled, unconsciously, into these signs like the Nike swoosh and the Coco Chanel logo’ reminding viewers of the insidious and never-ending long-armed reach of the corporate world.

Cooper’s reimagining of these familiar corporate symbols as what he terms Brand Mutations transforms them into illuminated lifeforms that appear to have broken free from their original roles as shop or brand signage. In doing so, they exchange their established semiotic value for a new sign system rooted in subversion and resistance. These logos are reclaimed, no longer functioning as vectors of aspiration or consumption but as emblems of critique.

As the future is slowly critiqued and then cancelled, Cooper’s mutated logos persist and resist, echoing Mark Fisher’s observation that ‘what haunts contemporary culture is not so much the failure of the future as its disappearance, its gradual cancellation’. Fisher’s diagnosis of capitalist realism, in which it becomes easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism, looms large over the exhibition. Levelling Up offers a compelling and unsettling meditation on that disappearance, staging it as both spectacle and ruin, and asking what forms of resistance might still be possible within, or against, the semiotic debris of late capitalism. Situated firmly within a post austerity British context, the exhibition positions art not as an escape from spectacle, but as a critical site in which its mechanisms might be exposed, repurposed, and momentarily disrupted.