Deville Cohen: Studio Visit

Inside the artist’s studio

Deville Cohen, formally trained with an MFA from Bard, was born in Tel Aviv, but is currently based in Brooklyn with a studio in Long Island City. Last week, my “The Work of Art from Studio to Museum” class took my inside the artist’s studio. Cohen takes elements of theater, sculpture, collage and cinematography and works them into assemblages and video pieces (POISON, 2011 is embedded below). He explores how an individual reacts and interacts with their surrounding environment.

POISON, Deville Cohen, 2011 from Deville Cohen on Vimeo.

The studio, overlooking a portion of the Manhattan’s midtown skyline, is part video maze and part ordered creative chaos. The first thing you see when you walk into the meticulously well-organized space is a larger-than-life 2-D rotating Xeroxed cheese grater, that leads to the “video space,” used for the backdrops in his video pieces. Cohen initially works solo on his pieces that marry the animate (human) with the inanimate (cars, zebra skin rugs, Xeroxed copies of moose, ladders, kitchen appliances) while playing with Xeroxed images and scale bending; however, he later employs the help of others in the filming and production, which are shot offsite. If Cohen gets the 3,000 square foot space he is currently vying for in Portland, Oregon, he will have to meet a February 2014 deadline to complete his current work-in-progress, based on the X-Files, ZERO.

The storyboard for ZERO

The various objects occupying the studio—lava lamps, boxes of binder clips and clothespins, Shakespearean works, power drills, wooden dowels, Gorilla Glue, etc., all give a slight glimpse into the spirited processes involved in creation. It would be interesting to document the evolution of his work since he currently uses architecture printers in Manhattan Staples and Kinkos, does not own a Xerox machine of his own and despite its extremely ephemeral quality, uses paper due to its low cost. The brief, intimate encounter with Cohen and his workspace painted him as a low-tech artist concerned with space (the book Full Moon sat on a Rubbermaid table in the middle of the studio), physics, (several equations, i.e. gravity, were part of his ZERO storyboard), geometry and highlighting the relationship that exists between humanity and the physical world.