Through carefully editing fragments of unrelated scenarios sourced from existing film, sound, image, music and dialogue, Toronto-based artist Aleesa Cohene develops unique stories, characters and scenes that aim to expand emotional consciousness.
In her project, Something Better, a striped pattern of saturated colours leads you through the gallery to a darkened room in which three synchronized monitors present different members of a family. Each screen introduces several film actors who soon merge into three shifting personae: father, mother and child. The three characters interact in a microcosm where they hear each other but don’t listen, look but don’t see and share relationships that are simultaneously distant and intimate.Something Better looks at the space of communication between individuals and expresses to what extent our relationships to others are constructed through mirrors of ourselves.
Something Better is a coproduction with the Impakt Foundation in Utrecht, Netherlands, in the framework of Impakt Works 2007, and has been made possible with the support of the Canada Council for the Arts, the Ontario Arts Council and the City of Utrecht.
Exhibitions are programmed by and presented in conjunction with the 22nd Images Festival, 2-11 April 2009. For more information please visit Images festival.
Documentation
Essay
Something Better by Dany Lyne
Cohene represents the utopian myth by meticulously selecting the textures, colours, patterns, clothing, objects, and architecture of the 1970sthe era of her own childhood. The illusion of togetherness, of family is present and seductive. Memory and fantasy mingle to create a psychological mechanism similar to denial as the architecture blithely enforces the nuclear family construct.
Artist Bio
Aleesa Cohene
Aleesa Cohene has been producing videos and video installations that seek to occupy the oppositional zone between ideas and emotion, cultural belief and personal integrity since 2001. Her work has shown in festivals and galleries across Canada as well as in Brazil, Germany, Holland, Russia, Scandinavia, Turkey, and the United States, and has won prizes at Utrecht’s Impakt Festival and Toronto’s Images Festival. Cohene has participated in artist residencies in Canada, the Netherlands and Denmark and is currently pursuing a fellowship at the Kunsthochschule fr Medien (KHM) in Cologne, Germany. Her work is distributed by Vtape in Toronto.