Sandra Cohen
art@sandracohen.com
www.sandracohen.com

Statement
November 2010

I am poking it with a stick.
I've always been intrigued by concepts with the potential for paradox, systems that can negate or alter their own functions: quantum physics, binary thought, rationality… religion. Some of our tools for clarifying a complex Reality act with intelligences of their own, as viruses do. Ideas may evolve, mutate, and replicate to usurp control from their "hosts." My work reflects my interests by evolving systems again and again that I must paradoxically destroy for it's own good.

I am fabricating little true stories from left-over falsified parts.
I mine material from our conceptions of Reality and the reiterations of those ideas to ourselves.
I focus on dismantling these scaffolds of Reality—for example, a 'female' reality of symbolic messages acting upon women and girls. Working 2-dimensionally, I aim to draw out any latent physical and temporal dimensions in my subject. I use layering, patterns, diagrams, color, and animal avatars to simultaneously facilitate and scramble messages, blur distinctions, and push that weird engineered logic towards circular collapse.

My working process mirrors the struggles between my own logical impulses and my desire to defy them. My successful work is n-dimensional, dumb, and savant. I hope to offer a pleasurable sensuality that eats itself as the experience becomes over-luxuriant… a narcotic, hypnotizing beauty that reveals vertiginous chaos. I am in my work as self-portraits, unordered chapters, all simultaneously true and false, infinitely probable, if not Real.
I am making a list of things that will never happen.