I depict tension in close relationships,
I've been using supper as a time when family gatherings emerge and metaphorically I see
the dinner table as a battlefield. There is no way one can hide emotional
drama. Drama makes us empathic. It works as a restoration through the poetic, rather
than a lamentation. It gives us a sense of suspended time and a feeling of rootedness.
I am interested in evoking dramatic encounters about families, relationships,
gender roles, power and desire.
With recurring motifs, characters and themes, where the end and the beginning merge, I group a number of paintings and objects to form one piece. Through differences within the parts I build clues that provide a certain kind of information, some elements are more abstract and some more figurative, some in the form of text and some images, some isolated and some accompanied as an escort but all of them blend together and form a new entity. The parts remain separate but not, and their co-existence in the same work generates ways of decoding the whole arrangement and a continuous reconfiguring of associations.
I have been working around the idea that interpretation is meant to be dynamic, and the context in which materials and, in my case, paintings interact is subject to the surroundings. In other words, the possibility to be aware and focused on the way paintings are displayed, as well as displaced can be used as material for installations or other arrangements to allocate new ways to experience emotions through art.
In summary, my interest in human relationships and the psychological interactions between subjects functions as a transitive metaphor. In parallel to that interest, the language of my work resides in the links of motifs within and between paintings and objects in space, and the tension that is built among all of these elements.
Karen Dana Cohen
With recurring motifs, characters and themes, where the end and the beginning merge, I group a number of paintings and objects to form one piece. Through differences within the parts I build clues that provide a certain kind of information, some elements are more abstract and some more figurative, some in the form of text and some images, some isolated and some accompanied as an escort but all of them blend together and form a new entity. The parts remain separate but not, and their co-existence in the same work generates ways of decoding the whole arrangement and a continuous reconfiguring of associations.
I have been working around the idea that interpretation is meant to be dynamic, and the context in which materials and, in my case, paintings interact is subject to the surroundings. In other words, the possibility to be aware and focused on the way paintings are displayed, as well as displaced can be used as material for installations or other arrangements to allocate new ways to experience emotions through art.
In summary, my interest in human relationships and the psychological interactions between subjects functions as a transitive metaphor. In parallel to that interest, the language of my work resides in the links of motifs within and between paintings and objects in space, and the tension that is built among all of these elements.
