Zoe Cohen
Philadelphia, PA
Website:
www.zoecohen.com
Social Media
Instagram
How would you describe your work?
I'm currently making drawings, broadly defined, on paper and on wood - although some of my most recent work on paper using water media feels like it's veering back to painting. I'm interested in an embodied abstraction - images and objects that point to the real world, to a human experience of being in a body, in a place, but using a translation into a visual language that is suggestive, that allows for interpretation and the possibility of meaning in every moment.
What inspires you?
Recently, it's complexity in a variety of forms. The tangle and mess of a field of grasses, or a marshy landscape. Pattern and repetition in our constructed spaces like stairs, cobbles, masonry. The complexity of the human endeavors I consider most important - organizing for change, the challenge of learning to be close with another human, of listening deeply to each other. And then some of the darkly beautiful elements of Judaism and Jewish history - terrible angels, burning visions, looking directly at the horrors and joys of being alive.
Can you speak about your process?
I tend to work in series or groupings, I find that the structure of that approach provides a sense of safety from which to explore. I often start a piece with an idea for a series of moves, or a specific formal approach I want to expand on from a previous piece. In a recent studio visit, the idea of "soft parameters" came up - I'm not a rule-based artist by any means, but I do work with loose sets of constraints. These might determine how close to the edge of the page or panel I plan to work, or how the sets of lines do or don't touch each other in an image. Then other aspects of the process will be more loose or free from within that structure. It's like having a score for an improvisation, which I've learned about from the dancers and musicians in my life.
How did you become interested in art?
Oh, how can I say! I loved making art from a young age, and was lucky enough to be encouraged by my parents. I took art classes of various kinds all throughout my childhood. In high school I ended up in a Saturday sculpture class at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts that I attended every single week for five years, and I also fell in love with darkroom photography at my public high school. Those were really formative experiences - in both disciplines, there was an intense focus, a sense of respect for the craft and for young artists from my teachers, and a beautiful and challenging feeling of suspended time in those studios.
Do you have any favorite artists, movies, books or quotes?
The impetus for much of my recent work came from looking at the drawings of Hyman Bloom, who is an artist I think more people should know about. His drawings of the Maine landscape are dark and moody and complex and magnificent. And here's a quote from writer and critic Gabriel Josipovici that resonated deeply for me recently: "... in so much modern art, we get the sense of an unfettered subjectivity, whereas, to me, the joy of great art lies always in the sense that it is fettered, that it is struggling with the difficult business of catching the world" (emphasis mine). This quote is from a fascinating book I'm currently reading, Gilgamesh, the Life of a Poem by Michael Schmidt, which I also recommend.
What advice do you have for younger artists?
I could say a lot, in part based on my experiences as an art educator for students from preschool through graduate level, but I'll focus on one thing to keep it brief. I struggled a lot with my identity as a young artist, and with giving myself permission to make the work that was most truly my own. It took me time to realize that I could do whatever I wanted, after some experiences with ideological purity in undergrad and grad school (it was the nineties!) At some point in my early twenties I put a note on my studio wall: "I make the rules". This is still a good reminder for me, and probably the most concise advice I could offer - it's true for all of us!
