Born 1944, Racine, WI. Lives and works in Montreal.
Over a thirty-year period, Lynne Cohen's photographs have become stylistic icons representing airtight, perversely artificial, highly compressed spaces. It is as if a leaden sky has descended into each institutional hallway, assembly room and antechamber that Cohen chooses to infiltrate and document. Highly considered rooms or open spaces are devoid of humans, eerily sterile. Although the spaces appear lifeless and chilling in their utilitarianism, Cohen has fine-tuned the process of documenting men's clubs, military bases, classrooms, waiting rooms, exercise rooms and spas, labs, exhibition halls and bureaucratic offices. To Cohen they have a certain attractionrepulsion and are spaces investigated with a nod to her inner performance artist who must seek out and infiltrate high security institutions to get her images.
Her latest series of photographs, in colour and black and white, was shot in a French military institution and are as dry and airless as the spaces in which they are presented.
www.lynne-cohen.com
www.olgakorpergallery.com