Barnett Cohen (USA)

Artist Statement/ Biography

Working across performance, painting, and poetry, Barnett Cohen chronicles the vast array of language and imagery as it moves through our shared consciousness. Cohen's work deals in anxious forces and neurotic tendencies, the apocalyptic and the quotidian, the individual and the collective. Shapeshifting through form, he synthesizes the denouement of the anthropence in his accounts of climate grief, state violence, queer ecology, respiration, surveillance capitalism, algorithmic labor, and the memification of meaning. Neither didactic nor overly thematic, his poems and performances mirror our post-narrative world in which flurries of chaotic stimuli destabilize the self. Composed of thousands of found and collected stickers, his paintings are constellations of contemporary mark making. In his work, Cohen advocates–overtly and subversively–against ideologies inherent in prevailing systems of power.

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Barnett Cohen is a poet, painter, performance maker, and political activist based in Los Angeles. He has exhibited his work, staged performances, and read his writing at numerous venues across the United States including REDCAT, JOAN, LAXART, Pieter Space, 356 Mission, Human Resources, The Box (Los Angeles), The International Center For Photography, Beverly's, JDJ (New York), Vox Populi (Philadelphia), and City Limits, Open Space/SFMOMA (Oakland & San Francisco.) A graduate of Vassar College and CalArts, he has been in-residence at SVA, Skowhegan, and MacDowell. In 2017, Cohen founded the Mutual Aid Immigration Network (MAIN), a multilingual free assistance hotline for people detained in immigration detention centers across the US. MAIN connects individuals in detention with bond funds and legal services that can accelerate their freedom from incarceration.