Aleesa Cohene: Something Better

C: International Contemporary Art, Autumn, 2009 by Jon Davies

ALEESA COHENE: SOMETHING BETTER

YYZ Artists' Outlet, Toronto

Through a small number of short videos crafted over less than a decade, Toronto-based artist Aleesa Cohene has achieved a remarkable maturity in her work. At first, I was misled by its apparent simplicity: as media artists have been doing for decades, she cobbles together found footage to explore themes such as immigration and xenophobia (All Right [2003]), or post-9/11 security paranoia (Ready to Cope [2006]). However, I was always left with a very palpable feeling of anxiety at each tape's end. Even if it was difficult to recall exactly what images had just unfolded, cumulatively, they had an undeniable emotional punch. As a result, it took me a while to recognize and appreciate the choreography that Cohene accomplishes with her appropriated material. An adept and seasoned editor, she generates a great affective power through the seamless stitching together of fragments from our shared memory archive of popular film and television scenes.

The affective power of Cohene's work is twofold. First is her ability to, as the psychoanalytic film theorists of old used to say, thoroughly "suture" the viewer into her montages. The effect of the videos' cohesion--despite the diverse origins of their parts--is nothing short of hypnotic. The shots of walking feet that set into motion some of Cohene's tapes are echoed by the forward-marching rhythms of her soundtracks, which lead the viewer along as forcefully as the images do. Second, her found footage largely originates from the period of her childhood, namely the late 70s and 80s, and she manages to carry through to the present day all of the potency that even the most banal moving images can have for the malleable mind of a child.

Cohene's images become compelling through accumulation and juxtaposition. In narrative, escapist entertainment, and in instructional documentaries offering order and control, Cohene finds evidence of the multifarious ways soul-rending political and familial traumas are imprinted onto the fabric of everyday life. Less narratives than evocations of emotional states, her videos tend to dwell on fragile human bodies, which stumble, collapse, crawl, and wander aimlessly, never failing to miss opportunities for communion with their equally suffering onscreen compatriots.

Something Better, a three-monitor video installation exhibited at YYZ Artists' Outlet in Toronto during the Images Festival, takes Cohene's practice to a new level. The three channels multiply the complexity and nuance of her editing exponentially, as each one follows a different member of a generic ur-Family: Father on the left monitor, Child in the middle, and Mother on the right. Each of these mythic archetypes is assembled from dozens of different characters gleaned from the mass media. In this installation, Cohene exposes and amplifies the multifarious states of emotional distress that undergird the middle-class family home, as represented in the comfortingly familiar images that she renders in an uncanny way.

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The video's investment in narrative is thin and, to use a term often applied to families like this one, dysfunctional. Something Better begins with father arriving home, mother turning him away, and child fleeing--and it unfolds from there. However, the monitors present not events per se, but intricately interwoven "in-between" moments. These moments accrue an intensity--particularly through the music and the dynamic movement within and between screens--which casts each scene as a kind of muted crisis.

Cohene is adept at evoking uneasy feelings of powerlessness and repression, but with each member of the family confined to his or her own monitor, communication is virtually impossible. A rare moment of connection between characters is sparked by the child's question, "are you really my mom and dad?," which elicits a barrage of concerned reaction shots from the parental figures flanking him. The other brief snippets of dialogue in the piece--which were also transcribed onto the window of YYZ'S vestibule--become intensified when lifted out of their original contexts. For instance, Mother says, "It is my job to do everything I can to make my children a part of a normal world...," while Father explains, "If I don't strip myself of all this clatter and clutter and ridiculous ritual I shall go out of my fucking mind."

While the title's promise of "something better" is ultimately unfulfilled, a feeling of hope remains. In a particularly winning gesture, the artist painted the wall leading up to the gallery space with a bright, rainbow of vertical stripes--mimicking the security blanket of the nerdy, alienated boy of one of her found vignettes. In the scene this wall decoration references, a character on a TV show that the child views in his dark bedroom speaks menacingly of "watching mankind with a hatred that is as boundless as the stars ..." hinting that the child may not be so powerless in this domestic drama after all. Reinforcing this idea, the object of comfort and security Cohene's child uses to ensconce himself crosses the boundaries of the monitor and his inexpressible, wild desires explode onto the gallery walls like a blazon.