Aleesa Cohene’s new video installation, I Told You That Might Happen, draws upon tenuous relationships between film-watching and our experience of present time. Known for her dissection, appropriation and re-contextualization of popular 1980s and 1990s Hollywood film footage, Cohene meticulously crafted this latest work from the 236 films that Gilles Deleuze discusses in his critical texts Cinema I and Cinema II.
I Told You That Might Happen explores the relationship between a dream analyst and her analysand: the former, a composite character of numerous on-screen women, and the latter, an off-screen male voice. The unraveling of the analysand’s dream and thoughts mirrors Cohene’s process of creating from disjointed fragments.
Cohene’s installation invites viewers to engage themselves physically with the work’s fabricated plot. A single narrative divided into three linear parts is realized through a physical experience of journeying through three different viewing stations. The viewing experience also features accompanying sculptural work that further implicates the viewer into a bodily experience. I Told You That Might Happen challenges our expectations of cinematic viewing and space with insertions of physical reality that may ultimately appear more uncanny than real.
Aleesa Cohene’s videos have been screened throughout North America and abroad in Germany, Netherlands, France, Sweden, Denmark, Turkey, Finland, Greece, Spain, Indonesia, Japan, Cambodia and Brazil. Recent solo exhibitions include: Sequences in Reykjaík, Iceland, Hart House at the University of Toronto and Galerie Suvi Lehtinen in Berlin, Germany. In 2011, Platform Gallery and MAWA in Winnipeg presented a multi-venue retrospective of Cohene’s work. She will receive her Masters of Visual Studies from the University of Toronto in 2013 and previously completed a fellowship under Matthias Müller at the Kunsthochschule für Medien in Cologne, Germany in 2010.
This exhibition is co-presented and supported by the Masters of Visual Studies program, University of Toronto
|
