Aleesa Cohene is a young video artist based in
Toronto who recently distributed her collected works (2001-06)
on DVD. Her two newest works, Supposed
To and Ready to Cope,
will be screening on a cargo ship through the canals of Utrecht,
the Netherlands, during Impakt Festival 2006.
In Supposed To, as in all her
work, Cohene seamlessly edits together found film footage
(mostly American) from the seventies and eighties. The result
is a kind of airtight passage where one whizzes by a multitude
of scenarios and characters that make an eerie impression
or ring some distant bell, and then quickly vanish. The editing
technique suggests a kind of mind-control echo - that this
vast bank of films we have watched growing up has deeply influenced
our conscious and subconscious behaviour.
A clear line running through Cohene’s work is that the body,
(shown in almost all her selected clips) is the ultimate receptacle
of ideology imposed on it. The body - shown here bursting
out of windows, falling down, rummaging, waking up, stuffing
itself with food, looking at its face in the mirror - is the
strange, uncanny filter that exposes the truth of how we feel
about our lives. In all her videos, the artist suggests that
intuition and physical impulse will overrule any attempt to
impose rational control. "There is a whole machine that works
because everybody does what they’re supposed to," says a voiceover
at the beginning of Supposed To.
Supposed To begins with a young
boy yanking off (with difficulty) a man’s cowboy boots and
then glides into a shot of a woman’s legs scrambling over
some falling sticks. It continues with shots of people walking
on various grounds, cropped only to reveal the lower legs
and feet. The technique sustains a kind of menacing tension;
you don’t know where the video is going or who is taking us
along. Rhythm is an important element, here; the images are
cut precisely and elegantly to an electronic pop-music score
(uncredited).
Ready to Cope begins with a young
boy dejectedly pulling at some tall plants, as the voiceover
comes on: "In the history of Canada there hasn’t been a crisis
this deep and this merciless." The disjunction of sound and
image is unsettling. The video continues to portray the body-in-crisis
in an unstable, unsafe environment (Cohene selects clips like
a woman’s high-heeled shoe getting wedged into a crack, a
woman snapping a pantyhose stocking, a person sliding down
a muddy riverbank). The work builds in tension and aggression
and expertly culminates in scenes of wind menacingly blowing
through open windows and people scrambling away from some
unknown threat.
Both videos are charged with an apprehensive, critical energy.
Cohene reveals the sensitivity of the body in a climate of
fear, so relevant to our current moment. Aleesa Cohene’s work
is distributed by V-Tape, in Toronto.
This article by
k.g. Guttman was published in the Concordia University
magazine “Les Fleurs du Mal”, “the
video art issue” Vol 1 – no. 2.
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