The Other Side
September 17 - October 4, 2015.
Opening Reception Thursday September 17th, 6 - 8pm.
Arcadia Contemporary 51 Greene Street New York, NY 1001 tel:212.965.1387 email:info@arcadiacontemporary.com www.arcadiacontemporary.com
Banquet
The Other Side by Kim Cogan Acadia Contemporary, September 2015
In his debut solo exhibition at Arcadia Contemporary, San Francisco-based artist Kim Cogan pushes the boundaries of realism to travel to the realm of memory.
The Other Side, the artist’s first solo exhibition in two years, is Cogan’s attempt to reconstruct how the mind remembers. Through paintings that piece together abstract memories with a palpable nostalgia of a distinct time and place, the artist creates a new, dream-like reality.
Cogan is a keen observer of his surroundings, capturing the passage of time and vanishing landscapes that hold so much memory. Haunted by the things that no longer exist, Cogan was interested in more than merely reproducing a literal translation of a place, a time or person. He wanted to create a story and evoke a longing for the past. “By combining old photographs with new ones, I wanted to make a complete image, very similar to how you might construct a memory in your head,” he says.
The challenge was in the process. Cogan composed the paintings in a way he had never done before. He used his own childhood photos and combined them with fragments of objects, people and environments to manipulate a new narrative, at once familiar and alien. Figures were not necessarily designed as the focal point, but sometimes drawn and redrawn around the surroundings. The brush strokes compliment the story by focusing on shapes, not likeness. Cogan says, “The picture is a starting point for provoking a deeper thought or memory. The paint is pushed to be more expressive.”
The story that unravels from these paintings is not about a singular subject or an exact reality. As Cogan puts it, “It is more truthful. There is honesty in how I experienced it, how I remember it.”
