Gallery Ehva ~ Contemporary and Early Provincetown Art: Barbara Cohen

Provincetown

Gallery Ehva

Contemporary & Early Provincetown Art

Ewa Nogiec, Director

Gallery hours:
Mon-Tue 11am-6pm
Wed-Sun 11am-8pm

provincetown
contemporary artists

James Bakker
Cid Bolduc
Rachel Brown
Daniel Cleary
Barbara Cohen
Didier Corallo
Daniel Dejean
Donna Dodson
Rob DuToit
William Evaul
Jenny Fragosa
Lorrie Fredette
Edward Giobbi
Wendelin Glatzel
Julie Gorn
Iren Handschuh
Myrna Harrison
Alicia Henry
Jenny Humphreys
Leslie Gillette Jackson
Zehra Khan
Jane Kogan
René Lamadrid
MP Landis
Bill Liebeskind
Jay McDermott
Kevin McDermott
Andy Moerlein
Ewa Nogiec
Fawn Potash
Meg Shields
Richard E. Smith
Sterck/Rozo
Lisa Ventre
Michael Walden
Rob Westerberg

Special Collection:
Richard Baker

Sculpture Garden (outside):
A Boat for the Impossible Journey: Andy Moerlein
Elevation: Andy Moerlein
Listening for Lightning: Andy Moerlein
Wind: Donald Gerola

74 Shank Painter Road
P.O. Box 1426
Provincetown, MA 02657
508-487-0011
www.galleryehva.com
art@galleryehva.com

AMPLE PARKING!

.....

Visit great sites about art & Provincetown:

ProvincetownArtistRegistry.com
iamprovincetown.com

Barbara Cohen

"Moving On" art installation, Cape Cod Museum, Dennis MA

August 7 - September 19, 2010

A few thoughts on Moving On

She is my friend so it makes me sad to say this, but Barbara Cohen knows something about loss.

That it is dynamic.

That it is insane (outrageous, excessive, extravagant).

That it is maddeningly paradoxical.

And that it is volatile: readily changing, fickle, evaporating quickly, from the Latin volare, to fly.
Like the blown glass plant specimens favored by 19th century botanists for their exactitude and minute accessibility, what Cohen offers us with this body of work is a physical model of her personal loss, not merely an expression of it but the thing itself, what her nervous system, she says, might look like as loss unfolds inside her.

The work is not limited to black and white but is extravagant in its grays. It never holds the artist to one gesture but allows her hand its full expressive range, polka dots one day, scribbles the next. It is made of Ping Pong balls, which are voluminous and weightless at the same time (and are, by the way, kind of funny). All of this speaks to the generosity with which Cohen has treated her own condition of grief, much as one would allow a loved one to grieve– the word latitude comes to mind. It's why the work never feels heavy, feels like a place you can linger, or not, less an artifact than a place you can come back to. "A place belongs forever to whoever claims it hardest, remembers it most obsessively, wrenches it from itself, shapes it, renders it, loves it so radically that he remakes it in his own image," writes Joan Didion, no stranger herself to the land of grief. In Moving On, Barbara Cohen follows such instruction to the letter, claiming, remembering, wrenching, shaping, rendering, loving, and remaking. Art as verb rather than noun. --Melanie Braverman

Melanie Braverman is the author the novel EAST JUSTICE (Permanent Press, 1996) and RED (Perugia Press, 2002), a collection of poems that won the 2002 Audre Lorde Poetry Prize. She is the Jacob Ziskind Writer-in-Residence at Brandeis University.

"Moving On"

I believe that in the indeterminacy of drawing – the contingent way that images arrive in the work – lies some kind of model of how we live our lives. The activity of drawing is a way of trying to understand who we are and how we operate in the world. - William Kentridge, South African filmmaker and installation artist

The simplicity of circles and squares, either free-floating or patterned in grid-like formation, has remained, over a forty-year creative evolution, the central image anchoring my work in drawing, painting, sculpting, and, most recently, installation.

The inner eye remembers what it first looks upon. I grew up in a family of Eastern European Jews transplanted to Lancaster County, Pennsylvania at the turn of the 20th century. In the distance I could see the landscape created by Amish farmers who still hand-plowed their fields, leaving geometric marks separating rows of grass and grain. My grandfather and then my father earned a livelihood making garments for these traditional farmers, who in their dress code kept faithful to fabrics of blacks and whites and a spectrum of grays. Quilters working in community houses laid grid-like patterns, but in oranges, yellows, purples: saturated blocks of color that later found expression in my painting.

Closer to home were the grid-like boxes and racks stacked with bonnets, hats and sewing supplies that formed the interior of my father's 12,000 square foot warehouse. All of these visual patterns came together as an inner rhythm. My sculpture grew from a tactile need to respond to these geometrically essential squares and circles, maintaining the neutral shades of the Amish code.
I started with a cork-like substance, Sesbania, common in Vietnam in 1996. Working with material from this small country, where I lived briefly and whose history of pain can never be erased, I sunk my paring knife down into the core of the cork. Going further into Sesbania's interior, I would slice its core into small circles, and carve its exterior into soft squares. The Zen-like discipline of hand cutting, stacking and gluing thousands of these almost weightless objects was followed by their transformation: some combined to become towers, others boulders seeming to march in a row; and an eight-foot cork sphere suspended in the air.

The Provincetown Art Association and Museum exhibited a retrospective sampling of these fanciful yet still minimal sculptures in the fall of 2006. This was the capstone of a decade's artwork. Four months later, my work was suddenly interrupted when my partner was diagnosed with a terminal illness.

What followed was a prolonged period of anxiety and anguish. Using graphite pencils (and later, permanent ink) to make marks on a ground as abundant and as yielding as the Vietnamese cork had been, I turned my attention to writing and drawing my various recollections on ping-pong balls. The surface has the character of translucent treated vellum and, being a sphere, has neither start nor finish. When illuminated from behind, their ethereal quality seemed to mimic my emotional state, mapping my nervous system.

Possessed, I drew continuous lines on hundreds of these faceless shapes with what felt like an unstoppable intensity. Every day there was a new set of these round vellum balls, inviting new experiments with abstract lines (zigzags, dots, loops, scribbles). The diversity of grades of graphite or ink, and the resulting variety of textures and tones, thin lines, thick lines, wiry fuzzy lines, became a barometer of my moods, a compendium of spontaneous drawing on a circular shape.
After scribbling on their surfaces and accumulating hundreds of balls, I wanted to see the balls in perpetual motion, flowing and separating, forming endless combinations, as spontaneous as their one-by-one creation. This, and the loss of my partner – loss and what follows loss – is the genesis of the piece "Moving On."

I ordered a ten-foot-long conveyor belt from the Midwest, and constructed a 4' x 4' metal container to house the balls. A timed motor was designed to set the balls in motion: now the ping-pong balls with their individual markings have become a free-form movable drawing, details constantly shifting. The movement of the lines excites me, as the vellum spheres jostle one another, their markings playing hide and seek, while the total surface pattern of the grid shifts ever so slightly.
Watching the ping-pong balls define and redefine their status within the closed space created by a square container is a reminder that nothing is permanent: like molecules in nature, the ping-pong balls are in constant flux, made and remade as their environment changes.

Related 6' x 6' drawings and smaller sculptures accompany "Moving On."

............

Gallery Ehva: Barbara Cohen portrait

Barbara Cohen

Selected Exhibitions

2010 Cape Cod Museum, Dennis, MA

2009 Gallery Ehva, Provincetown, MA

2008 Kobalt Gallery, Provincetown, MA

2007 Kobalt Gallery, Provincetown, MA

2006 Provincetown Art Museum, Provincetown, MA

2005 New York University, New York, NY

2004 Fitchburg Museum, Fitchburg, MA

2003 Gary Snyder Gallery, New York, NY

2002 The Schoolhouse Center, Provincetown, MA

2001 The Schoolhouse Center, Provincetown, MA

2000 The Schoolhouse Center, Provincetown, MA

Awards

Polaroid Artist Support, Polaroid Corporation, Cambridge, MA

Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant, New York, NY

Artist Foundation, Massachusetts Artist Fellowship Program, Boston, MA

Blanche E. Colman Award, The Boston Company, Boston, MA

Virginia Center for the Arts Colony Fellowship, Sweetbriar, VA

Reviews

Susan Rand Brown , Provincetown Arts, Provincetown, MA 2006

Ric Kadoor, Art New England, Boston, MA 2005

Anne Wood, Provincetown Banner, Provincetown, MA 2004

Ellen Howards, artsMEDIA , 2003

Jennifer Sperry, Cape Cod Arts, 2003

Susan Seligson, Provincetown Arts, 2002

Mark Doty, Out Magazine, 2002

Mathew Gilbert, Boston Sunday Globe, 2002

Kathi Scrizzi Dricoll, Cape Cod Times, 2002

Elizabeth Winston, Cape Arts Review, 2002

Elizabeth Winston, Cape Cod Life, 2002

Eileen Kennedy, artsMEDIA, 2002

Publications

Cohen, Barbara E. Dog In The Dunes · Revisited , Provincetown, MA, Fields Publications, May 2005

Cohen, Barbara E. Provincetown. Hanover, MA, University Press of New England, May 2002

Cohen, Barbara E . Dog in the Dunes . Kansas City, MO Andrews McMeel, October 1998

Cohen, Barbara E. and Taylor, Louise. Women's Best Friend . NY, NY: Little Brown and Co., May 1996

Cohen, Barbara E. and Taylor, Louise. Horses and their Women . NY, NY: Little Brown and Co., May1993

Cohen, Barbara E. and Taylor, Louise. Cats and their Women , NY, NY: Little Brown and Co., May 1992

Cohen, Barbara E. and Taylor, Louise. Dogs and their Women . NY, NY: Little Brown and Co., May 1989

Collections

Provincetown Art Museum, The New School, Werner Kramarsky, Polaroid Corporation, Boston Public Library

Education

School of the Museum of Fine Arts/Tufts University, BFA, Boston, MA

Oxford University, Oxford, England, Art History

Barbara Cohen