Join us for a workshop with media artist Aleesa Cohene!
Creative practices of appropriation, or imagery that is derived from existing and identifiable sources, have been regarded as transgressive, operating as a form of resistance or tactical intervention. Mimicry, according to Lacan, is camouflage. It constitutes a war zone. In the natural world an insect will mimic a leaf, not to meld with the vegetable state of its surrounding milieu but to gain power in the realm of predatory animal warfare. There is power inherent in the false: the positive power of ruse, to gain strategic advantage by masking one's life force. How can creative practices of appropriation be challenged by the unthinkable, the uncontrollable, the unconscious? What are our personal and shared ethics in this practice? ...
This workshop will provide participants with the opportunity to share their work at the end of the session for constructive feedback from Aleesa and the other participants. Please bring no more than 4 minutes of video and no more than 5 photographs.
Aleesa Cohene's solo exhibition I Don't Get It at Gallery 44 runs from Friday, September 8, 2017 to Saturday, October 21, 2017.
Aleesa Cohene is a media artist who uses found footage and sounds to create videos and installations about human intimacies. Cohene has been making videos since 2001, and in 2010 completed a fellowship at the Kunsthochschule für Medien in Cologne, Germany. Cohene’s audiovisual collages are expertly edited, telling oblique, strongly atmospheric stories. The artist’s found footage tends to come from Hollywood films and TV shows popular during her childhood in the 1980s and early 1990s; one example is the 2008 three-channel installation Something Better, which showed at the 2009 Images Festival and later at the Power Plant’s 2011 exhibition “Coming After”—a look at younger queer artists who came of age during and after the HIV/AIDS epidemic. Cohene was longlisted for the Sobey Art Award, and her work has also been shown at Oakville Galleries and Galerie Suvi Lehtinen in Berlin.
