NANCY COHEN

A Condition of Light

September 5 - October 12, 2013
In A Condition of Light Cohen enacts material transformations to create works that relate as much to physics as to alchemy. Glass, rubber, metal, paper pulp and found objects become luminous structures.  Plastic pools like water, fishing line becomes a gossamer tendril, glass appears liquid, abaca paper suggests the breath and the body, and a three-sided box becomes an impossibly light alabaster column. As in her previous work, Cohen offers singular and surprising sculptural formations that are somehow both unfamiliar and evocative.

Nancy Cohen has an MFA from Columbia University. Recent projects include installations in Karmiel, Israel; the CODA Museum in Holland; the Katonah Museum of Art in NY and a collaboration with environmentalists based on the Mullica River for the Noyes Museum of Art in NJ. Cohen has been awarded a Pollack Krasner Grant and Fellowships in Sculpture and Works on Paper from the NJ State Council on the Arts. Her work is in the permanent collections of the NJ State Museum, Jane Voorhees Zimmerli Museum, Montclair Art Museum, & Yale University Art Museum among others. Recent exhibits include a solo show at the Hunterdon Art Museum, NJ; a permanent installation at the Health Sciences Library, Howard University, Washington DC and inclusion in Shattered: Contemporary Sculpture in Glass at Frederik Meijer Sculpture Garden, Grand Rapids, MI which opens in September 2013.  In 2011 she was selected for the Pilchuck Glass School Residency and in 2013 she completed a collaborative residency with Anna Boothe at The Corning Museum of Glass. Cohen was born in Queens, NY and lives in Jersey City, NJ. This is the artist’s second solo exhibition at Accola Griefen Gallery.