Photographs

Cohen's photographs are ancillary to her paintings: field notes that she began taking in the early 1990s. They provide further evidence that, though the paintings suggest spaces of oceanic vastness, they are anchored to the world of appearances outside the studio.

From “A Personal History”
by Cora Cohen

“Beginning in the early nineties, I began to photograph my immediate surroundings as a form of visual note-taking, attempting to ground myself in places and cultures. I recorded my observations of natural phenomena, which functioned as observational records of life, like sketchbooks. Formlessness or anti-form also interest me conceptually and presents a visual challenge. It is often visible on the streets of New York, and I sought out the formless in the art of others. These, like the [Altered} X-rays, directly and spontaneously record responses to my lived experience. They annotate and comment upon places and events in my life so as to affirm my quotidian existence—aspects of my daily life that I would otherwise surely forget or neglect.”

In a catalog essay for Oblique Forms: Spray Paint Paintings, Photographs, The Hybrid Indexical Adventure Series, a September 2007 solo exhibition at Abaton Garage, the painter and critic Stephen Maine wrote:

“A big problem for abstract painting is how, absent of narrative or iconological referent, to ground the work in the present, and not float above or away from the viewer’s experience of the here-and-now. Because it does not depict elements of the visual world (other than itself), abstract painting is sometimes castigated for being remote from it, disconnected from the phenomena we routinely navigate. But just as there are archetypal forms in nature that give meaning to representation, there exists an archetypal formlessness as well. Such entropy expresses itself everywhere in the interstices, among the rigid structures of the urban matrix. Cora Cohen is determinedly alert to the unexpected beauty of this kind of breakdown, these system malfunctions, whether in the accumulated debris of a disused subway platform, the neon streaks of a polluted sunset, or the ashes of life in New York City drifting on the Hudson River.”

“A photograph is a fiction, too. Cohen’s photographs of the streets of Manhattan and Berlin engage the textures and tonalities of neglected spaces within the metropolis. They provide the evidence that, though the paintings suggest spaces of oceanic vastness, they are anchored to the world of appearances. The photos—snapshots by an artist who seeks out the unfiltered—are field notes, specimens, raw data. They often show features of the public domain refit to private ends, which is precisely analogous to Cohen’s studio procedure.”

RELATED DOCUMENTS

Stephen Maine, “Keeping it Real,” Abaton Garage, Jersey City, New Jersey, September 2007

Lauri Bortz, “Far Less Tangible States of Being,” Abaton Garage, Jersey City, New Jersey 2006

Raphael Rubinstein, “Cora Cohen, The Presences of Absence,” Cora Cohen, (Gregory R. Miller & Co., 2026)