Jeane Cohen’s paintings in This Watching Land progress through animal worlds, various landscapes, firescapes, and abstraction and ask the viewer to consider nature as sentient and always watching us back. The landscapes are not portrayals of particular places, instead they represent explorations of natural terrains.
This Watching Land is Cohen’s first museum solo exhibition and immediately follows her year-long residency at the Sharpe-Walentas Studio Program (Brooklyn). This exhibition will premier the works she created during her residency. Additionally, this exhibition will feature a stained glass window that will be installed into a skylight in the main gallery.
As John Berger writes in Why Look at Animals, “Animals are always the observed. The fact that they can observe us has lost all significance. They are the objects of our ever-extending knowledge. What we know about them is an index of our power, and thus an index of what separates us from them. The more we know, the further away they are.” Cohen intends to bring the viewers closer to nature, and awaken the part of us that is nature itself.
On the occasion of the exhibition, The Center for Maine Contemporary Art is co-publishing an exhibition catalog with the artist. Designed by Joseph Gilmore, the catalog will include contributions from notable critics Michelle Grabner and Barry Schwabsy, and an interview with Cohen conducted by the acclaimed artist Katherine Bradford. Excerpts from texts by activist Sherri Mitchell and scholar Karen Armstrong are also included. Timothy Peterson, Executive Director and Chief Curator of the Center for Maine Contemporary Art, is contributing a forward.
About the Artist
Jeane Cohen (b. 1988 Worcester, MA) divides her time between Midcoast Maine and New York. She received a BA from Hampshire College and MFA from The School of The Art Institute of Chicago. She has exhibited nationally at venues including the Institute for Contemporary Art at the Maine College of Art and Design (Portland), Miami University (Ohio), Slag Gallery (New York), Julius Caesar Gallery (Chicago), Make Room (Los Angeles), Able Baker Contemporary (Portland) and Vox Populi (Philadelphia), among other exhibitions. In 2022, Cohen was awarded a Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant and a Sharpe-Walentas Studio Program Residency.
Header Image: Jeane Cohen, Noon Triptych, 2023, 60 in x 144 in, Oil on linen;
Footer Images (from left to right):
Jeane Cohen, Land (Lost in the Stars), 2023, 70 in x 57.5 in, Oil on linen
Jeane Cohen, Two Elephants, 2023, 60 in x 48 in, Oil on canvas.