Aleesa Cohene, SOMETHING BETTER
YYZ Artists’ Outlet, Toronto, 7 March–18 April 2009
Through a small number of short videos crafted over less than a decade,
Toronto-based artist Aleesa Cohene has achieved a remarkable maturity in her work.
At first, I was misled by its apparent simplicity: as media artists have been doing for
decades, she cobbles together found footage to explore themes such as immigration
and xenophobia (ALL RIGHT, 2003), or post-9/11 security paranoia
(READY TO COPE, 2006). However, I was always left with a very palpable feeling of
anxiety at the tape’s end. Even if it was difficult to recall exactly what images had just
unfolded, they had an undeniable cumulative emotional punch. It took me a while to
recognize and appreciate the choreography that Cohene accomplishes with her
appropriated material. An adept and seasoned editor, she generates a great affective
power through the seamless stitching together of fragments from our shared memory
archive of popular film and television.
This affective power of Cohene’s work is twofold.
First is her ability to, as the psychoanalytic film theorists of old used to say,
thoroughly “suture” the viewer into her montages. The effect of the videos’ cohesion,
despite the diverse origins of their parts, is nothing short of hypnotic. The shots of
walking feet that set into motion some of Cohene’s tapes are echoed by the forward-
marching rhythms of her soundtracks, which lead the viewer along as forcefully as do
the images. Second, her found footage largely originates from the period of her
childhood in the late seventies and eighties, and she manages to carry through to the
present day all of the potency that even the most banal moving images have to the
malleable mind of a child. Cohene’s images become compelling through their
accumulation and their juxtaposition. In narrative entertainment that offers escapism,
and instructional documentaries that offer order and control, Cohene instead finds
evidence of the multifarious ways that soul-rending political and familial traumas are
imprinted onto the fabric of everyday life. Not so much narratives as evocations of
emotional states, her videos tend to dwell on fragile human bodies, which stumble,
collapse, crawl and wander aimlessly, never failing to miss opportunities for communion
with their equally suffering neighbours.
Something Better, a three-monitor video installation exhibited at YYZ Artists’ Outlet in
Toronto during the Images Festival, takes her practice to a new plateau: the three
channels multiply exponentially the complexity and nuance of her editing, as each
follows a different member of a generic ur-Family: Father on the left monitor,
Child in the middle, and Mother on the right. Each of these mythic archetypes is
assembled from dozens of different characters gleaned from the mass media. Cohene
exposes and amplifies the multifarious states of emotional distress that undergird the
middle-class family home, as represented in the comfortingly familiar images that she
renders uncanny.
The video’s investment in narrative is thin and, to use a term often applied to families
like this one, dysfunctional: it begins with Father arriving home, Mother turning him
away and Child fleeing, and it unfolds from there. However, the monitors present not
events per se, but intricately interwoven “in-between” moments. They accrue an intensity
– particularly through the music and the dynamic movement within and between screens –
that casts each scene as a kind of muted crisis.
Cohene is adept at evoking uneasy feelings of powerlessness and repression,
but here each member of the family is further isolated to their own monitor, making
communication virtually impossible. A rare moment of connection between characters
is sparked by the child’s question, “are you really my mom and dad?” which elicits a
barrage of concerned reaction shots from the parents that flank him. The other brief
snippets of dialogue in the piece – which were transcribed onto the window of YYZ’s
vestibule – become intensified once lifted out of their original contexts: mother says,
“it is my job to do everything I can to make my children a part of a normal
world…”, while father explains, “if I don’t strip myself of all this clatter and clutter and
ridiculous ritual I shall go out of my fucking mind.”
While the title’s promise of “something better” is unfulfilled, hope remains.
In a particularly winning gesture, the artist painted the wall leading up to the gallery
space with bright, vertical rainbow stripes. This pattern exactly mimicked a nerdy,
alienated boy’s blanket in one of Cohene’s found vignettes. A character on a TV show
that he views in his dark bedroom speaks menacingly of “watching mankind with a
hatred that is as boundless as the stars…” hinting that the Child may not be so
powerless in this domestic drama after all. Here the object of comfort and security that
her Child protagonist ensconces himself in exceeds the boundaries of the monitor and
his inexpressible, wild desires explode onto the gallery walls like a blazon.
This review was written by
Jon Davies for
C Magazine, (Issue 103), October 2009.
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