Additional Images

Provenance:

Private Collection, Montreal, QC

Note:

Of her practice, Lynne Cohen explained: “I prefer to allude to things and leave it to the viewer to fill in the details. Like Brecht and Godard, I want the audience to do some work.” Cohen has long focused on photographing “found environments”: empty spaces bereft of human presence, yet purpose-built for human needs.

Cohen leaves most of the interpretation of these spaces to the viewer, asking them to project their own experiences and anxieties of place. While early in her career Cohen would label images with more specific titles, these were soon pared down in favour of more vague and concise titles. This evolution of her titles is reflected in the two works on offer in this auction, one from 1977, “Indoor Swimming Pool Display, Swimming Pool Store, Ottawa,” and her very large work “Untitled, (Windows)” from 2011. Both spaces are both novel and familiar, a peculiar mix of banality and strangeness where function often triumphs over aesthetics.

Canadian writer James D. Campbell noted that “Cohen has always focused on these uncanny interiors, building up a remarkable inventory of images that were initially mostly executed in black and white. She seems to choose her locations for their sheer strangeness and radically indeterminate character and is reluctant to share their site-specificity. Now colour has been brought into the mix in a way that accentuates their implicit surreality and adds dimensionality. Images of meticulously built places for purposes that are heretofore unknown to us and that would remain unknowable but for their laconic titles, they nevertheless appear to have arrived from an extravagant elsewhere. If the medium of photography itself has been built upon a dark heart of deception, then Cohen is a beautiful liar. [...] Cohen’s places hew to another order of significance altogether and while they share some of the same parentheses, they get under our skin, and yield a frisson – as though they were surgical theatres for a photographer’s wayward trepanning operations.” (1)

(1) https://www.frieze.com/article/lynne-cohen