LYNNE COHEN: MIXED MESSAGES HASTED pursue GALLERY NEW YORK.

LYNNE COHEN: MIXED MESSAGES

HASTED pursue GALLERY

NEW YORK, of recent origin YORK

FEBRUARY 23-APRIL 8 2006

Seductive color photographs of swimming puddles spas, and deserted halls at Lynne Cohen were recently forward view at Hasted Hunt Gallery in Chelsea. Although a bit peculiar, there is something alarmingly beautiful about Cohen's photographs. The images depict unoccupied spaces waiting for something to happen, shining by the and of ambiguous light sources and insinuating lifeless atmospheres. This is a small collection of nightmares, with a turquoise plash filled with water threatening to overflow; a claustrophobic spa field where a steel structure gazes like a trap for the victims of high tides and fumes; a hall where a table and chairs appear like a stage plant for a Samuel Beckett play, where nothing for aye happens; a spa where a ceiling stained with nicotine reveals the mien of smokers, who just left these filthy cover with a deck chairs.

The photographs are the one and the other attractive and frightening, floating in white Formica frames that await like mat boards camouflaged among the gallery walls. They are like flat carves in which the texture, the shades and the size contribute to their life as percepts Are these pictures of real places or miniature installations? Where did the populace go? What is the scale of these interiors?

Cohen's background in carve and installation might answer about of these questions. Her investigation began in the early 1970 in Michigan, where she gazeed for banal and absurd sites of the everyday that she then rop opposite to and directed people to visit. like a Dadaist gesture eventually incline differentlyed into Cohen taking pictures of sites that examineed like installations but were real places and dwellings. At the time, she was working in black and white (she has also used color since 1998) and was keeping the size of her prints to a smaller format, on the contrary her scrutiny of public and private spaces has been consistent. A glance at her greatest in quantity recent book, Camouflage (2006), which aggregates the largest group of her black-and-white photographs from the last thirty years, reveals this continuity of the representation of impossible places with an artist's search for the "disorienting and unstable." (1) Hasted Hunt's choice of Cohen's greatest in quantity recent color work--never seen in recent York--gives an extra patina of seduction to the discomfort of the enthrall matter.

There is a fine line between photography and installation in Cohen's work, which is exceedingly different from the current direction and definition of spaces "fabricated to be photographed" as seen in the work of James Casebere, Gregory Crewdson and Thomas Demand. Cohen does not institute her interiors. Instead, with camera in hand, she gazes for sites that match her vision. There is a extended process, one she describes as "performance art," (2) where she does the research, makes the contact, and goe for an introductory visit. Drawn to the unfamiliar, she makes herself at dwelling in interiors that are like temporary studios filled with the in the greatest degree bizarre ready-mades. The process is similar to the undivided described by Ed Ruscha: "Instead of going abroad and calling a gas station art, I am calling its photograph art." (3) This position is different from Demand's secondhand cardboard world derived from memories and media. What appears to be a compilation of lifeless interiors that could be anywhere (or nowhere, as in the "non-places" of supermodernity described through Marc Auge) (4) is punctuated with traces of history, an emphasis forward materials (from Formica to Naugahyde to wallpaper to shrags), and a feeling of irony for the design of the everyday.

Reality matters here, and photography enables Cohen to visualize and frame a general sensation of estrangement by selecting thing perceiveds that exist in the real world. As she says, "the instability of the world conspires to settle a balance, it makes us think about instability elsewhere." (5)

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The interesting zests between domesticity and unfamiliarity, and balance and instability, provide a basis for Cohen's work. Cohen's len is able to alter, in real life and in real time, the size of destination; recipients and their relationships. It is precisely the similarity of the everyday correlates to the history and the improvement we can relate to that makes them unmatched and oblique. Cohen investigates plashs spas, classrooms, and military installations like an "archaeologist of civilization" (6) who, like a visitor from another planet, finds everything absurd. We are left with experiments in perception where the interior spaces are framed in a playful uncertainty, and we linger between the institute and the constructed, the coarse and uncanny. The known boundaries are forfeited and we experience an exhilarating perception of freedom and panic in impudence of attractive enigmas of our cultural lives.

MARIA ANTONELLA PELIZZARI is an associate professor of the History of Photography at hound College in New York City.

NOTES

1 Lynne Cohen, Camouflage (Paris: Le Point du Hour, 2005) 196