Hashimoto Contemporary is happy to existing Tracing Shadows, a solo exhibition by Boston-primarily based artist Genevieve Cohn. The exhibition will be Cohn’s inaugural solo presentation at Hashimoto Contemporary.
Tracing Shadows tells the story of a neighborhood of women of all ages that exist in an imagined entire world, in which they only reside for 1 rotation of the earth on its axis. Setting up on this imagined mythology, the figures depicted in the paintings attempt to history a mild that will only be professional at the time before it slips away. Living in a environment that has this one of a kind practical experience of mild, the gals devote their daily life trying to far better understand their world and systems that construction it. In numerous of the paintings, ladies are depicted referencing, tracing, or recording shadows. The shadow is in the end reworked into an working experience that is more good and tangible than that of the sun, increasing queries of fact vs. actuality, considering the stage the place truth of the matter and actuality occur jointly and wherever they split aside.
Pulling from numerous sources, Cohn’s inspiration is rooted in the Women’s Land Military, the history and imagery of witches and witchcraft, and literary fiction. Plato’s Allegory of the Cave, The Comprehensive Cosmicomics by Italo Calvino, A Limited Historical past of the Shadow by Victor Stoichita and the small stories of Einstein’s Dreams by Alan Lightman also formed this physique of get the job done.
Tracing Shadows speaks to the shared encounters of groups of persons, and the makes an attempt to issue, record and recognize that shared expertise. In this imagined universe, the females born at distinct situations of working day create shared know-how and tradition, so that these born afterwards in the gentle can start where people in advance of them left off, speaking to our human historical past of storytelling and fascination in scientific experiments.
About her work, the artist states, “My paintings project possible communities of girls by drawing from both equally a historical and imaginative earlier, present, and potential. My paintings acknowledge and replicate a earth exactly where electrical power is derived from collaboration, self-endowed agency and relationship with the normal world. I consider strategies of collection, adornment, splendor, and alternative as the figures within the worlds of my get the job done build spaces that have interaction ideas of ritual and practice.”
Remain tuned to our 8-site characteristic on the works of Genevieve Cohn in our Winter season Quarterly.