Cohen, in cultural Quebec, is spontaneously associated with a man. However, this dear Leonard is not unique. A pioneer in her field, conceptual photography, Sorel Cohen belongs to that category of artists that time and institutions have set aside for obscure reasons. The artist-run center Vox pays a more than justified tribute to the photographer, who will be celebrating her 85th birthday at the end of the year.
The main interested party admits to having been surprised, “very surprised”, when Marie-Josée Jean, director of Vox, called her to let her know of her intentions. As if at his age and long after his last solo (in 2013, at the late Donald Browne Gallery), there was nothing more to look forward to. Yet she had never had a retrospective.
The exhibition Conceptual metaphors, signed Marie-Josée Jean and Claudine Roger, the two heads of Vox, fills this void with accuracy and justice. Fifteen works, or series of works, recall the rigor adopted in 1975 by Sorel Cohen to revisit art, its modernity, its masculinity, and tint it with affect and intimacy.
In an interview, the artist will not admit that she dreamed of the retrospective inaugurated the day before. However, she tells an anecdote about The Grid (1975-2021), one of his very rare sculptures, which reveals his deadpan side and his feelings towards a vast exhibition.
“I remember having put [The Grid] in a garbage bag and left it in a corner. I was asked what I would do with it. I replied that I was keeping it for my retrospective. But I was throwing it away. It was 1980, she says. Marie-Josée took an interest in it, so we did it again. “
Made of muslin, a light and soft fabric, this “grid” suspended and folded on itself undermines one of the emblematic motifs of modernity. Placed at the opening of the exhibition alongside other variants of this attack in order, The Grid announces the formal explorations that the exhibition brings together, in photos and (one) video.
Before arriving at photography, Sorel Cohen went through sewing, in which she had embarked on to escape painting, too rigid. At the time, a student at Sir George Williams University (the future Concordia), her professor was the already giant Guido Molinari. Impressed ?
“I wasn’t happy at all,” she says. I didn’t like what he was teaching me and he didn’t believe in what I was doing. “
She began to sew, convinced that she had to devote herself to an art that would speak of her as a woman. She took as an example the Joyce Wielands of Canada, the Eva Hesse of Europe, the Martha Rosler of the United States, and in particular of the latter the “wonderful video” Semiotics of the Kitchen (1975). ” TO [l’université], guys were arriving with beers, dogs, trucks. I just wanted to do the opposite. I brought my sewing machine to the workshop. I thought I was making a radical move, but it wasn’t. “
A photography teacher was instrumental for Sorel Cohen by introducing him in particular to the cyanotype process. “I never had a camera,” she says. We lent her one and that’s how she started taking pictures of herself every morning when she was making her bed. Recording and showing “the repetitive nature of domestic activities” has become a leitmotif for her.
Present at Vox, the series The morning rite (1977), Houseworks (1977) and Domestic Activity as Visual Information(1977), this one gathering cyanotypes, as well as the artist’s book House Calendar (1976) account for the creative importance that the act of “making the bed” has assumed. In the video Houseworks (1976), we see her repeating the task day after day. In this daily performance, the invariable element is a blanket reproducing the pattern of the grid.
In Vox, works from the 1970s dominate in number. We find there with reason the series The Shape of a Gesture (1978), which has become the emblem of his signature since 2011 and the collective exhibition Arch-feminists! from the Optica center. In these images marked by the presence of a brightly colored cloth, the artist “performs” another domestic task, washing windows.
The human body and mattresses or other fabric surfaces (rag, sheet, clothing) go through the Cohen years, from one series to another, until Dolorosa sofas (2008), the most recent among those presented. The fourteen images of this one list the offices of psychiatrist, but are distinguished by the absence of the human figure. The body is elsewhere, in the traces left on each of the couches.
“It’s less a daily routine than a sort of artist’s book,” Sorel Cohen says of him. This is the story of my visits to the shrink, as an activity done on a regular basis. “
Sorel Cohen had the right in the 1980s to a major exhibition at the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal (MAC). Since then, institutions are no longer interested in her, with the exception of the Canadian Cultural Center in Paris, in 2003. The artist does not want to be resentful, she who is aware of having contributed to the feminist movement, and benefited from it. She nevertheless notes, for example, that the MAC only has four works by her, the fourth of which stems from her donation in 2017 of an edition of The Shape of a Gesture. Cohen or not, 2017 is the year the same museum celebrated the other Cohen, Leonard.
“Until this donation, the MAC only had things that didn’t matter to me. They didn’t buy anything from my solo from [1986] She laments. She doesn’t insist. She wasn’t expecting anything any more, anyway. And the surprise Vox satisfies her, amply.