Hashimoto Contemporary is pleased to current Tracing Shadows, a solo exhibition by Boston-based artist Genevieve Cohn. The exhibition will be Cohn’s inaugural solo presentation at Hashimoto Modern day.
Tracing Shadows tells the tale of a group of gals that exist in an imagined earth, in which they only are living for just one rotation of the earth on its axis. Constructing on this imagined mythology, the figures depicted in the paintings attempt to document a light-weight that will only be knowledgeable when ahead of it slips absent. Living in a environment that has this one of a kind working experience of light, the gals dedicate their existence trying to superior realize their globe and systems that framework it. In quite a few of the paintings, girls are depicted referencing, tracing, or recording shadows. The shadow is ultimately transformed into an encounter that is much more reliable and tangible than that of the sunlight, elevating concerns of reality vs. actuality, thinking about the point where by reality and fact come collectively and where by they crack apart.
Pulling from many sources, Cohn’s inspiration is rooted in the Women’s Land Army, the historical past and imagery of witches and witchcraft, and literary fiction. Plato’s Allegory of the Cave, The Entire Cosmicomics by Italo Calvino, A Limited Background of the Shadow by Victor Stoichita and the brief tales of Einstein’s Dreams by Alan Lightman also shaped this body of get the job done.
Tracing Shadows speaks to the shared experiences of teams of people today, and the makes an attempt to issue, record and recognize that shared practical experience. In this imagined universe, the girls born at various situations of working day develop shared awareness and custom, so that all those born later in the light-weight can commence where these just before them remaining off, speaking to our human background of storytelling and desire in scientific experiments.
About her get the job done, the artist states, “My paintings task doable communities of women by drawing from each a historical and imaginative past, current, and upcoming. My paintings acknowledge and mirror a earth where ability is derived from collaboration, self-endowed agency and relationship with the all-natural earth. I take into account strategies of assortment, adornment, beauty, and selection as the figures in just the worlds of my function build spaces that have interaction suggestions of ritual and follow.”
Stay tuned to our 8-page feature on the works of Genevieve Cohn in our Wintertime Quarterly.
