Lynne Cohen at P.P.O.W - photographic exhibition - Brief Article

of recent origin YORK

Lynne Cohen achieves carefully reasoned events in these recent (1999) large-format color photographs. The images are, without exception, unpeopl quasi-industrial interiors including laboratories, spas, military installations and halls chooseed for the bright, surreal ordinariness of their architecture and furnishings--pools, lighting fixtures, ceramic tiles, dropp or expos ceilings, railings--and for their impersonal and clinical atmosphere. Cohen tracks down these hermetic places, frequently alerted by an image in available print media. She gains access end a businesslike courtship, calling upon the approaches that seem greatest in quantity productive, including the use of legitimate university letterhead alluding to her professional stature. If necessary, she identifies herself as an artist. Her work looks unobtrusive, as if she would constitute no threat or unreasonable interruption to the day-to-day operations at these various sites.

Cohen began her photographic practice nearly 30 years ago. The medium appealed to her, as it has to many conceptually oriented artists, for its lack of pretense its relative independence from art-historical interests and its mobility. She chose the seductive limitations of the interior as make subordinate as though each new interior constituted a specific kind of ground object. A view camera allows her the maximum step of control over her production. Because she forms all images on the principles of linear perspective, they watch to be vertically and horizontally symmetrical, although the camera is slightly lower than center in the field, emphasizing the image's reaching far down space.

From a month of shooting upon location, Cohen may select a single image. She is critically involved in overseeing the printing proces She high hills and mats the prints at an equal distance upon each edge, labels them by dint of category on the lower border of each mat, and incorporates low-profile laminate frames that are as uniform as the window mats themselves. The framed images are hung rather depressed on the wall, which involves the architecture of the gallery in the perception of the work. The relationships between the viewer and the framed percept and between the viewer and the interior showed are such that the viewer is shakeed into the image. The experience is intentionally theatrical, a reminder of the existence of the fourth wall.

individual especially intimate, somewhat off-center, interior from the "Laboratory" series direct the eyes disturbingly like the low extreme point of an altogether different category, "Spa," on the other hand without a pool and not quite in like manner slick and bright. A single track-lighting fixture and more [i]or[/i] less additional illumination wash the diagonal of a fulvid tiled partition, spilling onto a depressed wooden platform bearing a white-cased pillow in a shadowy alcove just beyond. In the words immediately preceding [i]or[/i] following of the exhibition's somewhat exuberant tech and hygiene, the image present the appearanceed especially sinister. Laboratory for what? There are no ball of threads This masterly work is sufficient to itself.

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