Sorel Cohen is a Canadian photographer and visual artist currently living and working in Montreal, Quebec, Canada. She was represented by Donald Browne Gallery in Montreal until the gallery closed its doors in 2016.
Biography
Sorel Cohen was born in 1936, in Montreal, Quebec, to parents of Ukrainian and Polish descent. Cohen pursued post-secondary education in Montreal, earning a Bachelor of Fine Arts from Concordia University in 1974, as well as a Masters of Fine Arts in 1979. Her Masters thesis examined feminist influences on art in the 1970s, and her work has continued to be shaped by her feminist values.
Style
Sorel Cohen has worked extensively with portraiture, both behind and in front of the camera. The majority of her work has a focus on both autobiographical works as well as feminist works. In the 1970s, Cohen began experimenting by combining photography with performance art, which was a relatively new idea at the time and soon became known for this. Cohen often combines the use of this performance art with a slow shutter speed, creating a blurred aesthetic. By displaying these photographs in a series, the viewer feels a sense of time passing through them. Cohen draws inspiration from all forms of art, from painting to sculpture, to performance in her photographic work. Although Cohen's work comes from personal experience, she gives her photographs a quality that allows for interpretation, giving them an almost universal meaning. Cohen has produced an extensive collection of work that comes from a perspective of psychoanalysis.
Influences
Eva Hesse
Joyce Wieland
Martha Rosler
Sigmund Freud
Francis Bacon
Eadweard Muybridge
Photographic themes
Feminism
Cohen’s feminist stance in her art was triggered by an interview between Lucy Lippard and Judy Chicago which she read in Artforum. She explains in her master’s thesis: “I realized then, that if I was going to be making artworks for the rest of my life it had better have something to do with me as a person, and in particular, as a woman.” Cohen used photography to combat stereotypes of women, as well as subvert society's beliefs around a what a woman's role is. By placing herself both behind and in front of the camera, Cohen presents a commentary on the representation of women in these roles.
Absence and psychoanalysis
A published book featuring her work Divans maudits (with a text by Gérard Wacjman) shows how Cohen was strongly influenced by psychoanalytical perspectives. Some her most well-known work features primarily empty beds and couches. The photographs carry another strong theme that is found in many of Cohen’s works as well, the theme/idea of absence. By photographing these empty couches and beds, objects that are primarily only seen as important when they are full of people or things, Cohen aims to capture what is missing.
Notable works and collections
The Grid (1975-1976) This series of muslin sculptures echoes the grid as an emblem of modernism. The handcrafted quality of the fabric sculptures however recalls traditional women's work and defies the modernist and masculine pursuit of uniformity and repetition. From the sculptures in The Grid series, the artist also creates contact prints on canvas using techniques such as cyanotype and Van Dyke brown. When sewn together, these prints replicate the sculptural works in a 1:1 scale, resembling a "shadow". This series thus marks a transition between the artist's sculptural and photographic practice.
Le rite matinal (1977) In 1977, Cohen begins a series of works (color photographs, video, cyanotypes) based on the action of making a bed. Among these, the series of photographs Le rite matinal shows the artist performing this action repeatedly in front of the camera with an impression of movement obtained by a slow shutter speed and a long exposure time. By performing this banal action in front of the camera, the artist links women's domestic work with their artistic work, often neglected in art history.
The Shape of a Gesture (1978) The series The Shape of a Gesture (originally titled Domestic Activity as Painterly Gesture) shows the artist in action as she cleans a window with a colored cloth. This work refers to abstract expressionist painting by substituting the flat surface of the painting with that of the window and subverting the painterly gesture through a domestic activity traditionally reserved for women.