Color is the candle of artistry. It warms us, giving off sparks in the chiaroscuro of form alone. More than shape, more than texture, color lights up our life or brings us down. But more: it links us to communities. Not only communities of color in our racial language, but in the recognition that color references are linked to social life.
Painters have different relations to color. For some it is tangential, for others essential, and for still others, like Marcia R. Cohen, defining. Some artists strive to provide narratives, at the core of their work, no matter how pictorial, is a story; others are consumed by form, shaping of perception of how objects fit together; a few painters wish their work to be textural, revealing dimensionality and structure through the illusion of flatness; still others use color as their primary mode of communication. Through Giotto, Turner, Monet, Matisse, or Rothko, the colorist is the composer of the canvas, producing a fantasia.
Marcia R. Cohen brings to The Museum of Contemporary Art of Georgia (MOCA GA) such a visual sensibility: depending on a sociology of tints. Color is a means by which viewers come to feel the heat of the world, but also, perhaps surprisingly, such work can also reveal place. Some of Cohen’s work, results from her time as a fellow in Maastricht where she studied the palettes and pigments of 16th and 17th century artists, but it is her recent artist residency in the Azores Archipelago that has been the most influential on her current body of work.
Cohen recognizes that every locale has its palette, its own spectrum. When we think of the Greek Isles our thoughts tumble to sky blue and perfect white: this reflects heavens, seas, and soil, but also the colors of buildings and the Greek flag itself. No one would mistake Mykonos for Tunis or Turin. So too, Provence has its colors, as does Aberdeen, Rio, and Saigon. For Cohen her fellowship in the Azores proved inspirational. She collected bric-and-brac found on the island of Flores, creating a journal/artist’s book that comprised a collection of shells, rocks, soil samples, and plants, permitting her to recognize the natural palette of the islands. Cohen refers to this process as creating a “color geography.” Not just looking down, she explored the spectral/sunlight displays that found their outcome in her series of sensual rainbows. These tones were integrated into her peaceful, elegant work that provides an emotional entryway into this land that few in her audience have visited. The sensuous greens, calming blues, bouncy yellows, and torrid oranges provide an Azorean state of mind. To belong to an imagined community is to be aware of what colors belong and which stand apart.
Perhaps most striking about Cohen’s work, despite its focus on color, is its diversity of presentation. The whispers of the Azores works are counterpoised with hot, challenging pigments. An important early theme, Color Atlas: Blindspot 12, transforms Polaroid images of vintage tests used for determining color blindness. In this Cohen reminds us that color is not naturally experienced, but is filtered through the variability of anatomy.
But the effects of color go beyond how it is seen. While color depends on the chemical properties of objects as they reflect and refract light, color is fundamentally psychological and social. As a society, we select color with care, knowing that, given communal expectations, shades have predictable effects. In the middle of the gallery space is a table with twenty small wooden, Bauhaus-like objects, Gifts and Occupations, pigment on polar wood. These have the vibrating and vivid colors of the nursery, and one is not surprised to learn that Cohen was inspired by the blocks designed by Frederich Froebel, the inventor of the Kindergarten. Despite the efforts of some marketing firms and contemporary designs such as Karim Rashid, the colors feel as if they do not fully belong to adult objects, but should be found in an imagined toyland. Indeed, such designers might just be appealing to our inner child: one with a credit card. Just as some foods appeal to adults and others to children, the same can be said of colors.
|
Finally there is the world of the logo, color as corporate language in her series Mascots, vinyl paint on wood with wool felt shapes, adding a haptic invitation to touch. But these works also suggest that extreme and saturated colors can provide cues for consumption. Just as we know nations (red, white, and blue) or colleges (yellow and black) by their colors, so we recognize firms. Every Atlantan can intuitive recognize the specific shade of red that designates Coca-Cola. Another shade of red reminds us of American Girl dolls. And there is a certain IBM blue, and John Deere green. If a company gains the symbolic control of a color, it acquires vast power in a marketplace in which its goods or advertising can be seen at a distance. Cohen plays off of this recognition in her works creating symbols and markers, displaying the linkage of perception and power.
Sight Specific is about more than art, more than about beauty (even while the Azore color shapes are luscious), but it challenges us to consider the relationship of the visual to the social order. And the show is experimental, always testing new modes of presentation. Cohen abjures a single visual style. Her works belong to a creative process; collectively they attempt to solve the puzzle of how color provokes thought and response. The work is scientific, not in testing a hypothesis, but in revealing interdisciplinary avenues of exploration. Playing with color constitutes her signature style.
Marcia R. Cohen is known by reputation for her clothing, selected in black, white, and shades of grey, especially her self-designed eyeglasses (a logo as much as that of any multi-national). Her personal style, inspired by Goethe’s Farbenlerhe, reflects her place as a trekker in the world of color: the outsider looking in, demanding that we see what was always present, but which we blithely ignored, pretending that color naturally and easily belonged to that world. Sight Specific makes us recognize that color is deeper, richer, and more complex than this. Color surrounds us, but until we attend to it the prettiness of the world may blind us to how that prettiness is a human achievement.
- Dr. Gary Alan Fine |
