centre d'artistes.artist run centre
14/11/08 – 14/12/08
Opening : Fri 14/11/08 at 7pm
Discussion with the artist: Sun 16/11/08 at 3pm
Text by Nathalie Olanick click here
Aleesa Cohene produces videos and video installations that seek to occupy the oppositional zone between ideas and emotion, cultural belief and personal integrity. She is presenting SOMETHING BETTER, a video work set in an environment specifically created for her exhibition at articule. The gallery is painted in a striped pattern of saturated colours and contains a smaller darkened room in which there are three synchronized monitors presenting different members of a family. Each screen introduces several film actors who soon merge into three shifting personae: father, mother and child. Through carefully measured picture editing, sound sampling and music remixing, 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 extend our relationships to others are constructed through mirrors of ourselves.
Aleesa Cohene was born in 1976 in Vancouver and is now based in Toronto. Her work has been 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. She has participated in residencies at the Banff Centre of the Arts, Impakt Works in the Netherlands, Solyst in Jyderup, Denmark and M4gastatelier in Amsterdam, Netherlands. Aleesa Cohene's work is distributed by Vtape in Toronto, Canada.