Karen Dana Cohen
The Class
Oil on Canvas and Flash on Papier-mâché
h 48" x w 48"
2021
About her work:
Painting as a performative practice; how we inhabit our bodies in a foreign context while making bridges meeting the viewer halfway. Engaging with the meaning of home and place, and the consistent looming threats of erasure, removal and cultural legacies imposed on immigrants like me. Gestures explore displacement, belonging, translation, and power dynamics.
I treat painting as an expression beyond language, confronting a rhetoric of exclusion. Work that embodies and gives voice to the lived immigrant experience as testimony of longing, migration, and shaping new identity. “To survive the borderlines, you must live sin fronteras, be a crossroads”. Gloria Anzaldua