Nicole Cohen received a BA from Hampshire College (Amherst, Massachusetts) and a MFA (University of Southern California). She has exhibited at the Williams College Museum of Art and the Fabric Workshop and Museum (Philadelphia, PA), the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, The J. Paul Getty Museum, and the New York Public Library. She has also shown internationally in Berlin, Germany; Bergen, Norway; Paris, France; Harajaku, Osaka, Kobe, and Tokyo, Japan; and Shanghai, China. In 2011, she had her third museum exhibition,”Driving in Circles” at the American University Museum Katzen Arts Center in Washington, D.C. In September 2011, she unveiled a public art sculpture, “Interiors: Marilyn, Michael, and Versailles” in the Pacific Design Center in Los Angeles.
Catalogue Text: Video works
Interior design, the relation of film and space, the dynamics between history and identity, as well as questions concerning the history of visual media and performance are crucial concerns that set a thematical frame for the video installations of Nicole Cohen. Although trained in painting and drawing, Cohen most frequently uses video as her medium, playing upon its intrinsic capacities to manipulate time, distort scale and environment, and overlay imagery. By creating a correspondance between film projections and static images and positioning these in the exhibition space, she opens up profound questions concerning a debate on the role of the image at the beginning of the 21st Century. In works like „New Outdoor Way of Life”, “Yard” or “Out of Body”, Cohen is using static images from magazines and other printed matter as a kind of projection screen. While this historic visual material is on one side documenting a certain form or aesthetics of a time, it is on the other also triggering and shaping our thoughts and imaginations: if we see i.e. the cover of an interior design magazine from the 50s our thoughts and imaginations on what could happen in these empty spaces often are formed and limited by exactly the setting and layout of the magazine. When Cohen now starts projecting her films onto these pages she starts to bring a new life and a new potential to these images: we could say she is re-animating these rooms and out imagination. All of a sudden the empty rooms are filled with life: Punks dance on tables and sofas, couples fight on terraces, and ghosts walk through backyard spaces… And we understand that anything can happen in every place.
In two interesting ways this video practice and way of installing of Nicole Cohen’s work is something that is strangely related to the early days of photography and film. One is historical reference point can be seen in the so called „ghost or spirit photography“. Professional photographers in the hey-days of the photo used their knowledge of double exposure on one side to mystify the ‚magical’ new technique of photography and on the other side trick people into seeing and fantasizing about ghosts. The photocamera was becoming the magical tool that was able to detect spirits which the regular eye couldn’t see. If we compare these photos to Cohen’s works an interesting twist can be seen: the artist turns the dynamics of fooling people around by using and exposing the projector as the ‚magic tool’ that enables us to visualize people in spaces where the aren’t. But in difference to the old days here we understand that this not trick which is played on us, but on the contrary – an offer that is made to use our fantasy.
The other aspect that comes to my mind when we see one of Cohen’s installation series is the fact that this very form of fixing a row of video beamers on metal arms in a straight line and certain height not far from the gallery wall somehow reminds us of images from the very early days of cinema. By entering one of the so called Penny-Arcades people were supposed to walk towards the projection machinery that was lined up at both sides of casual storefront building (creating an Arcade) and watching movies by leaning over the machinery watching down into those boxes. This way of approaching the cinematic machinery was far from the one which in the ‘apparatus and ideology’ debate of the late 60s was criticized for being to absorbing or the basic necessity for the phantasmagoria of film. Here there is no way of creating a complete absorbing illusion or a way of avoiding to see how the apparatus that tries to construct this illusion was working. For Cohen’s installation series the same can be said: you have to move and bend a little over the construction to get a straight look at the picture. By doing this we are never even close to being fully absorbed into the projection. It seems more like a situation where the installation exposes its own mechanisms of functioning. This reflection on the functionality in combination with an offer to engage in fantasy is not only rare in the recent video discourse, it is a unique statement which beautifully wants us to critically fantasize.
Marc Gloede, Art Critic & Curator, August 2010
Text & Artist Bio Paragraph
“Cohen’s work is positioned at the intersection of contemporary reality, personal fantasy, and culturally constructed space. She consistently explores her interest in engaging the audience and challenging notions of lifestyle, domesticity, celebrity, and social behavior. Although trained in painting and drawing, Cohen most frequently uses video as her medium, playing upon its intrinsic capacities to manipulate time, distort scale and environment, and overlay imagery.”
“Please Be Seated”, Press Release, 2007-09
Text on Nicole Cohen’s Work:
LOS ANGELES—Home décor magazines tantalize readers with fantasies of ideal modern living. Museum period rooms do the same, encouraging visitors to imagine lifestyles from groupings of objects and interiors that evoke an authentic historical time and place. In each scenario, the viewer remains an outsider, the ramifications of belonging and owning untested.
By inviting visitors to step into the picture in Please Be Seated: A Video Installation by Nicole Cohen, the artist provides the audience with the opportunity to move beyond the role of voyeur and become an active participant in the work.
Commissioned by the J. Paul Getty Museum to bring new perspectives and contemporary strategies to its renowned collection of French decorative arts, Cohen’s project will be on view at the J. Paul Getty Museum in a special gallery on the Plaza Level of the South Pavilion beginning September 18, 2007 through January 11, 2009.
For Please Be Seated, Cohen selected six 18th-century chairs from the Getty Museum’s permanent collection, each representing a different style, form, function or history of ownership. The artist created a unique video for each chair by intercutting footage filmed at the Musée national du château de Versailles, the Musée du Louvre and the Musée Nissim de Camondo in Paris with footage of the Getty Museum’s own period rooms. The work is completed each time visitors take a physical seat in one of six abstracted white reproductions of Getty chairs, and their image is projected by surveillance camera into the video footage playing on a television screen above. Thus past and present, contemporary and historical are layered and juxtaposed to create the final work of art.
Please Be Seated is more than a straightforward historical fantasy. Cohen plays with carefully crafted images in which day turns to night, chairs travel from room to room between Paris and Los Angeles, and actors dressed in contemporary fashions pose amid 18th-century interiors. In accepting the invitation to this metaphorical game of musical chairs, Cohen and her audience trade the comfort of control, context and reality for shifting expectations, uncertainty and fantasy.
“There is an increasingly great interest within the field of contemporary art to incorporate viewers and their responses, and we are tremendously excited to invite the public to take an active role in this new video installation project by Nicole Cohen,” says Dr. Michael Brand, director of the J. Paul Getty Museum. “Cohen’s work also provides us with an opportunity to take a fresh look at our permanent collection, to draw links between historical and current artistic practice, and demonstrate our commitment to promote and present the work of contemporary artists.”
Please be Seated: A Video Installation by Nicole Cohen was curated by Peggy Fogelman.
