Barbara Cohen exhibits her work at the Cape Cod Museum of Art in Dennis
Provincetown Banner, Reva Blau Aug 6, 2010
Barbara Cohen, who will be exhibiting her work at the Cape Cod Museum of Art on Route 6A in Dennis from Aug. 7 through Sept. 18, doesn’t let herself get bogged down by the stubborn myth that abstraction and realism can’t mix. And to prove it she finds materials as absurdly ordinary as ping-pong balls to create her art. She then works and re-works the objects into shape using light, contours of grey, and even the velvety sounds the bouncing balls of table tennis make when they jostle each other.
In this exhibition, titled “Moving On,” the artist will feature an installation that has culminated in three years of drawing with graphite on ping-pong balls. A complex drawing set into motion, “Moving On” is indeed more than the sum of its moving parts. In her studio, where she works almost every day all day, Cohen says, “This is the first time that I see that my work has cycled around. There’s real continuity that I didn’t see before.”
The ping-pong ball isn’t the first everyday material that Cohen has transformed in her work until its use value has been exhausted. In 1996, Cohen spent time in Vietnam. The time in the country that still bore the scars of many years of war was significant in many ways but also because she discovered a ubiquitous natural cork called Sesbania. She spent the next several years working with this fleshy, tan material that grows plentifully in Asian wetlands. The material happened to be inexpensive so Cohen could order as much as she needed.
The work — completed over 10 years — is like she pulled out the stopper from this everyday stuff. In her light-filled studio are cork pieces and bags of many more. The rest of the studio is filled with canvases charged with pink, violets, azure and oranges, framed by black-and-white photographs of ping-pong balls.
“I took the rounded cork during those years and I’d take that to the point of total abstraction. I do that with every material I work with. I work at it repetitively. And then I don’t stop with one media but cross over through different media.” She shows a painting of a small child’s potholder that is also the subject of prints, painted photographs, and drawings.
In 2007, the Provincetown Art Association and Museum showed Cohen’s cork work. Large half-moons of thousands of pieces of carved cork swelled from their place on the floor, as if pulled by a tide.
From a Jewish family that had migrated from Eastern Europe at the turn of the century to Lancaster, Pa., Cohen attributes the early budding of her artistic interests to two visual experiences of her youth. Her father owned a dry-goods store. As a child, she marveled over the boxes in the warehouse. In a documentary film that will be shown at the exhibition, Cohen says, “I think somehow there was an imprint of that repetition of that stacking. If you look at the history of my drawings and paintings, there’s a lot of stacking that goes on and I feel that the repeated patterns of my work stem from that.”
These boxes contained sewing supplies and fabric that her father would use to make clothing for the Amish farmers who lived in the fields nearby. The geometry of the neat rows of fields and the spectrum of grey worn by the Amish farmers blended with her experiences marveling at the multiple stacks of boxes.
Cohen is enjoying a year of exposure. In addition to the exhibition, a book of painted photographs, entitled “New York, Love Affair,” came out a few months ago. It contains New York City places — a brownstone or a certain corner in the Park, iconic bakeries and delis — that only an insider would know and depict so lovingly. Michael Cunningham, author of “The Hours,” aptly writes that Cohen’s pictures celebrate the city as a “dowager queen . . . a revival of a past perception of a city.”
Cohen considered herself primarily a painter throughout the time she was carving cork.
In 2007, Cohen’s cherished life partner, Honey Black Kay, died. In the wake of the event, Cohen suffered what she describes as “a personal catastrophe.” She found herself each day scribbling on the ping-pong balls.
“The drawings were different according to my mood that day,” she says.
Soon she was drawing on 100 or 200 a day. (Now, the statement given by the museum discusses the work as tracking her nervous system during this period.)
Annually, Cohen discusses her work in the critiques given at the Drawing Center in Soho. Nina Katchadourian, a curator at the Center, brainstormed with Cohen about the possibilities for putting the ping-pong drawings in motion by setting them into a mechanical machine of some sort.
Cohen then met an artist and fabricator in town, Kevin Cotter. Cotter took Cohen’s sketch for the installation and drew the concept using a computer 3-D model. He introduced her to John Goldstein, a fabricator who works out of his warehouse in Brooklyn. Taking apart two old conveyer belts from Michigan, Goldstein constructed a small machine. He made a four-foot Plexiglas box with a motor that could move two or three layers of ping-pong balls. It is a drawing that moves in waves.
Other pieces that will be shown at the museum are photographs enlarged, drawn and painted upon until you no longer know into which category they fall.
“As an artist I’ve never worked as a painter so collaboratively.” Then she laughs and adds, “The hardest part of the whole three-year project has been talking with truckers and dispatchers.”
Currently, she’s working with, on, and through a new material: small square potholders, the kind you made for Mom when you were in second-grade. Over and over again in a dizzying array of media and formats, Cohen reiterates the icon of the childhood art project — a neglected beauty, like Cohen’s New York City, that is forever seen but not always lauded as an art object. Here, these funny little squares become poignantly living abstractions.
