Noga Cohen

Noga Cohen (b. 1994, Israel) is an artist based in New York. She earned her MFA in Visual Arts at Columbia University in 2021. She is the recipient of David Berg Foundation Fellowship, Artis Contemporary Fellowship, and Brevoort-Eickemeyer Fellowship (2019-2021).

She earned her BFA in Visual Arts from Shenkar Institute of Design and Arts in Tel Aviv, Israel, in 2018. The same year she won the Margaret and Sylvan Adams Prize for Emerging Artists, The Gross Foundation Award, and the SBY Grant for emerging Photographers.

Can you tell us a bit about the process of making your work?

My process is very gestural and experimental. My background is in photography, so I’ve earned my knowledge in sculpture through experimenting with materials and discovering forms, textures and shapes that excite me. I enjoy discovering the inherent, essential qualities of objects and materials and exploring relationships between body and space. Physical gestures such as hanging, twisting, wrapping, burning, and breaking, are essential for my practice and reveal shapes and textures that echo bodily qualities.

My photographic practice was based on methods such as cropping, layering and obscuring images. This is my way of learning and observing the world - extracting pieces of information and decontextualizing them. Sculptural practices such as collecting objects, manipulating and deconstructing them, are ways of externalizing mental processes, and investigating psychological matters.

I use a lot of objects that have a relationship to the body in my practice: furniture, insulation materials that are often used in house constructions, packaging and wrapping materials, trash and plastic. The furniture is often broken and deconstructed. Through breaking and reconstructing it I explore new structures that often transform into anthropomorphic forms. I was attracted to those twisted, broken shapes, and found that they have an interesting relationship to the other materials that I use.

I was always interested in the idea of the body and ways the body is perceived. This has always been the main subject that my work revolved around, but for me, an idea of a body isn’t limited to what we think and know a human body is.

In the past two years, I was thinking of how to approach making art in a world that is in a constant state of crisis, while healing myself. I spent time thinking about my role as an artist in a world that is becoming increasingly hostile and unsafe. I instinctively started to react with physical gestures in my studio when those questions came up to the surface level. I used the set of skills that I cultivated in my photographic practice in order to understand reality, myself and the world.

I started to draw a line between my own personal trauma and the ways I work with materials in my studio practice, and other kinds of trauma and violence. witnessing growing precariousness and uncertainty in the world, I became interested in the ways that my own personal trauma, my scars and my pain, have a relationship to accumulating damage around me. I started looking at oceans and deserts as bodies, and saw that the pollution and damage that accumulates slowly is similar to the physical and psychological damage that accumulates in one’s body and mind.

My main approach to sculpture, and especially to found objects, is burning. I enjoyed transforming different materials using direct high heat, and memories I had as a child, seeing big piles of trash (mainly industrial waste outside of factories) along the desert roadways, transformed by the heat of the sun, impacted this practice. I remembered the smell, and the wrinkled, skin-like textures of these gigantic, monstrous, bright and colorful piles, and how disgusted and attracted I felt and at the same time looking at them. I grew up in the most polluted city in my country, by the sea. I remember plastic waste that was washed to the shore after big storms, and how it always looked like chewed up, half-digested toxic mash. Those memories are implemented in my practice, and impacted the ways I think about accumulations of violence and trauma.

Tearing down objects, breaking and rebuilding, burning and melting, were actions I took to create a fragmented representation of the reality as I experienced it. I think of my practice as a merge between an internal and external reality, and the work that I make as an expression of this duality. I found similarities between the ways the inanimate objects held traces of pain and trauma, and the ways it’d manifest in one’s body. Through my process, I want to define what pain is, what violence is, and how it manifests in the body that carries those traces and notions of violence.

Close-up shot of “Cub Twist” by Noga Cohen

Tell us more about your work in the show.

The sculptures in the show, Cub Twist and Head Over Heels, were created using a similar technique.

I found pieces of furniture and wanted to deconstruct them in order to have a better understanding of each one and its relationship to the body. I broke them in my studio and put the broken pieces back together in different ways, suspended from the ceiling. A big part of my process is working through a cycle of destroying and healing, breaking and fixing. I started wrapping the suspended broken structures with wrapping nylon, to activate the negative spaces, gravity and weight of the objects.

I worked with high heat on these pieces. The objects were wrapped, and I melted the plastic with trash and other materials to create textures that resemble bodily qualities. I added fiberglass and hot wax that had a fleshy feeling. The highly unpredictable process fascinates me and the element of discovery in it leads me to explore qualities that are familiar and uncanny at the same time. For example, textures that resemble a wounded or scarred skin, flesh, dry blood, fat, that result in the most toxic and synthetic material interactions, interest me. While the works were hung from the ceiling they looked to me like butchered animals, pieces of meat in a slaughterhouse. When I finished making the work, I detached it from the ceiling and placed it on the floor and noticed how gravity impacted the structure of it. It started to look like residues, remains, like objects that carry traces of chaos.

What are some references you draw upon in your work? Are there any themes in particular that you like to focus on when creating?

I have many sources of inspiration, but I don’t use direct references. I usually listen to audiobooks in my studio while I sketch or collage, so I recently finished “The Body Keeps the Score” and I am currently reading Elaine Scary's “The Body in Pain”. Reading about the relationships between pain, trauma and the body has been really eye opening for me. In terms of visual references, I am fascinated by images of plastic islands in the ocean, fat-bergs (rock-like masses of waste matter found in sewer systems, especially in big cities) and micro plastics. Writing is a big part of my practice. I use my own writing, that is based on personal memories, as a starting point for making work.

Where are some of your favorite spaces that support contemporary art or design? Now that the art has an online presence, has that changed?

I recently had a great experience participating in a show supported by ChaShaMa, in a space at the lower east side. I went gallery hopping when I was there and checked some of my favorite spaces in the area, such as M23 (I just saw the beautiful show by Karinne Smith, for example). These days I consume more online art than I used to, which allows me to visit my favorite galleries from my home country (like CCA in Tel Aviv) online and see what they are up to even when I can’t fly there and visit in real life.

Who are some of your favorite artists? Or who has been inspirational recently?

I love the work of Eva Hesse, I am deeply influenced by her in many ways. Recently I have been looking at Paul Thek and Chaïm Soutine’s work a lot, because they both dealt with materiality of flesh and decay in interesting ways. I’ve been looking at Dora Budor’s work. She is an artist I met earlier this year and I love her sculptures.

I am also inspired by film and video art. My friend Denisse Reyes recently created a film that is engaging with questions of memory and identity - watching it felt very emotional and vulnerable for me, and this is the kind of experience that inspires me as a viewer and as an artist.

Do you have any shows coming up? Anything else you would like to share?

My Thesis exhibition at Columbia University is opening soon, it’ll be up until November 20th. I am showing a new body of work, including sculptures and a video installation. The show is at the Lenfest Center of the Arts in New York, featuring 11 artists.

Noga Cohen’s work is included in our show “Time Wont Tell,” November 3rd - December 30th, 2021. Visit her website here or on Instagram @nogie.

Takuji Hamanaka

Ivana Carman

p g