Memoriae Corrugatae-B, by G.D. Cohen

Memoriae Corrugatae-B, 2018, by G.D. Cohen. Corrugated, newsprint, re-photographed found snapshots  printed on tissue paper, archival ink marker. 22.5 in. x 20 in. 

About the Artwork: "At base, they are simple works of collage, albeit ones that flirt as much  with subtraction as they do with addition. As a medium, corrugated is  uniquely suited to acts of excision and excavation, able to reveal hidden  topographies, eloquent voids, and unforeseen incongruities. These  qualities, to my mind, are analogous to the functioning of memory,  which is why corrugated lends itself to ruminations on remembrance  and forgetting, the lost and the found, intimacy and distance, on levels  at once material, psychological, and social.  

Indeed, these works began not with corrugated per se, but with several  anonymous snapshots dating to the 1920s or 1930s that I had found  some eight years earlier, at a rummage store, in the drawer of an  antique desk (and which I had already employed in an earlier project).  For the Memoriae corrugatae, I began by rephotographing these found  snapshots, in certain cases using a wide-angle lens to distort their  proportions. I also used photo editing software to remove the faces of  certain figures, then reprinted the images on tissue paper, which I prize  for its fragility and transparency. The newspaper clippings derive from  the obituary pages of the New York Times. To assemble the  various components of each piece—again, “assemblage” here refers  equally to removal—I followed a more or less aleatory process, first  excising portions of surface material from the corrugated, then  applying the images and clippings, followed by additional excisions and additions of corrugated scraps, and finally applying straight black lines  with an archival ink marker (suggestions, perhaps, of a map or  diagram, of an internal structure of linkages and lines of flight)."

About the Artist: (b. 1971) a visual artist living in Los Angeles, is a founding associate of REASArch. His artistic practice and visual research center on matters and methods of appropriation, speculative archives, and fictive art. Informed by landscape theory and aesthetic philosophy; issues of cultural memory and institutional critique; the history and theory of architecture and urbanism; and the intersections of post-war avant-garde art and radical politics, Cohen’s practice ranges across numerous media, from analogue and digital photography to experimental film and video, and from collage, drawing and painting to sculpture, installation, and performance. Cardboard and corrugated, in particular, have long enjoyed a privileged place in Cohen’s work, including his newest project—provisionally titled Anarchijectures—involving sculptural works concerned with waste, detritus, recycling, and the possibilities of visionary architectural form. Cohen is the creator of several large-scale, multi-media, visual research projects and installations, including The Valaco Archive (ongoing, and online at https://valacoarchive.com); Portrait: (Auto-)biography of a Way of Seeing (exhibited in 2016 at the Institute of Cultural Inquiry in Los Angeles); and, most recently, Grupo Anarquitectura (rama argentina), a major ongoing work of speculative world-making. Preliminary versions of the Grupo Anarquitectura project were presented in 2019 at the SALON_02_PLAN group show at UCLA’s Department of Architecture and Urban Design, and at the inaugural lecture of the Graduate Program in Education, Art, and Cultural History at the Universidade Presbiteriana Mackenzie, in São Paulo, Brazil.

G. D. Cohen is also a curator, educator, and scholar of visual culture. From 2012-2019, he served as Associate Programmer for Los Angeles Filmforum, one of North America’s longest-running venues for the screening of experimental film, avant-documentary, and alternative, artist-driven, cinematic art. Since 2012, he has co-curated the Festival of (In)Appropriation, an international showcase of experimental found-footage film and video. Cohen currently serves as Continuing Lecturer in Latin American Visual Culture in the Department of Spanish & Portuguese at UCLA, where he has taught since 2008.