Opening Reception | Saturday MARCH 10, 6 - 8pm
In this series, "French Connection", Cohen portrays the concept of 'home' using the time-based media video, to record the recent past by superimposing it into historical drawings. While researching a former French colony named French Azilum, a slated retreat for Marie Antoinette post French revolution in Pennsylvania. Cohen discovered drawings made by early settlers who drew the land from direct observation to record this time period. She explored the area and overlays the drawings with what was still standing. This exhibition features three videos chronologically layering media and drawings together giving narrative and impression of this lost history.
Cohen often employs images of interiors to explain the gap between the familiar or contemporary comforts and the past of what we imagine it to have been like. Says Cohen, "My interest is in how spaces are used with implied scripts of how to act, evolve and play out. This project is my first land driven project, where I use interiors and exteriors simultaneously. Similar to their conditions of existing outside and inside the concept seemed relevant. "
Nicole Cohen recently moved back to New York, where she lives and works. She received her MFA from the University of Southern California, Los Angeles in 1999. Her work has been the subject of three solo museum exhibitions: Please Be Seated at the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles, CA from 2007-09 and My Vie en Rose at the Williams College Museum of Art, MA in 2003 and Driving in Circles, American University Museum in Washington, D.C. last year 2011. She has shown internationally in Germany, France, and in Norway. This year, 2012, she was commissioned to exhibit a video installation at the Brooklyn Museum of Art's Artist Ball/ Gala. In 2013, she will have a solo exhibition at the DeCordova Museum and Sculpture Park in Lincoln, Massachusetts.
