Aleesa Cohene | |
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I have known Aleesa for seven years. We met on the stairs of the Cumberland Theatre where she was standing with her friend Benny who introduced us. The screening (was it Miranda July? No. But it was something like that, precious and one-of-a-kind) was over and people were streaming by all around us. Our heads were filled with new pictures, as they have been ever since. And in the subsequent years we have met most often at Charles Street Video, a place where the flow of pictures old and new can be managed and ordered and named. No surprise at all that she works there now as the in-house editor.
Aleesa’s work is related to ‘received wisdoms,’ it is largely made of footage made by others, and from this archive she extracts, with an uncanny precision, particular moments. While the role of the found footage artist is hardly a new one (even TV promos feature clip montages culled from the vaults) this is so very different. Aleesa gathers so that she can change the speed of her materials, she lets them settle inside her, until they become her pictures. These images wouldn’t “belong” to her any more than if she had gone out and shot them herself. Somehow, her role as an artist involves the recasting of these pictures into moments of her own life. These small instants, grown back inside the body, then become a new alphabet which she uses to write new stories, which belong entirely to her. And then to all of us.
Over and over again she returns to the middle class home where actions which never happened for the first time recur again and again. This sutured medley, broken and reassembled to show where the cracks are, make evident something of the strain of having to live inside these houses. She shows us the pictures we live inside. She arms herself with her feeling, and then she moves out into the world where everything is a bit too much and overly sensitive, and from these difficulties a politic arrives.
She raised the bar for her practice with a pair of movies made in tandem, worked on (and over and accompanied, lived in and lived through) over the course of some formative years, when she was in search of a container for a particular progression of emotive possibilities, of re-drawn narrative tangents which would at last become her narrative, her sense of enclosure and entrapment and escape. This pair of twins (they are fraternal, they don’t look alike) she named Supposed To and Ready to Cope. They were finished in 2006. She used the same strategies to produce her next work, the multi-screen installation piece Something Better. Here the gender divide looms large, and she is prepared to individuate her subjects, not only floating them into a cascade of pictures but holding them up and allowing them to speak. She gives us permission to attach ourselves to them, before she firmly and gently releases them. This sense of immanent departure marks all of her work. The way the pictures enter, the way the pictures leave, they are like cabaret acts under a kindly stern ring master. This makes for a satisfying surface, it’s so easy to be swept up in all that gloss which is necessary to hold the pain which lies everywhere under the surface, almost and always about to break out. Smothered in all those honey dripping Hollywoodisms, the smooth electro-beats, the finger popping montage, it’s only then that the real pain can be entered and admitted and lived again.
Something Better is a summing up and denouement of what has gone before. Now she is prepared to go further, and I am holding my breath in hope. The stakes are high, the pictures already overcoded, the machines are waiting. She is ready. After everything that’s happened, there are new stories only she can tell. Let her have the voice to tell it. Give her the blade, the flatscreen, the body of pictures. Let the cutting begin.