Lynne Cohen

Fortifications

April 20, 2020 – May 31, 2020

Timing is everything. It’s probable that there has never been a more appropriate moment for looking at the photographs of Lynne Cohen than this current era of social distancing. Unprecedented in living memory, the global COVID-19 pandemic has left so many of our communal spaces emptied of human presence. Our homes, our offices, all of the spaces that lent us comfort in days past have become threatening traps where the ominous spector of viral activity lurks. There is an element of impending danger on every unwashed surface. The loneliness of empty apartments mirrors our own as we reach out virtually to the communities that we should no longer physically touch. Cohen’s photographs seem to be prescient in their vision of spaces emptied of people. It is an unnatural state of being and only now are we fully appreciating how uncomfortable that emptiness feels; living inside a Lynne Cohen photograph.

In this virtual exhibition, representing our contribution to the 2020 Scotiabank CONTACT Photography Festival, we invite you to peruse these images from the safety of your own home. The photographs in this exhibition span 5 decades of Cohen’s career, featuring multiple formats and the full complement of diverse settings that was an endless source of fascination for the artist during her lifetime. Empty Spas, places of community and gathering seem repellant now as zones of easy viral transmission, but they also tug at the heart strings as beacons of our formerly carefree social lives and monuments to struggling businesses. An emergency preparedness hall awaits a strategy to resolve a crisis. Condominium lobbies and lounges (were they ever occupied?) sit awaiting guests that may not arrive for months. For the germaphobes among us, perhaps the most stark and sterile empty bedrooms captured here are where you would most like to wait out your own COVID-19 isolation?

These are our fortifications, our safety nets. Sometimes they feel like home, at other times they elicit a fight or flight response. This is the landscape we leave behind when we shut our doors to begin our extended isolation. It is bleak. It is beautiful. Rediscover and explore this all too familiar terrain as only Lynne Cohen could capture it.