Nadia Lee Cohen casts her cinematic eye on the Jeffrey Deitch Gallery in Los Angeles in her debut US exhibition on the allures of the ordinary
HELLO, My Name Is, the solo show by Nadia Lee Cohen
A faithful testament to artist Nadia Lee Cohen’s cinematic vision lies in the artist’s ability to cast the light of cinematic allure onto quotidian life. Whether it’s Kim Kardashian, bright-eyed and big-haired in front of a retro Hollywood Hills poolside, or any number of nudist mise-en-scènes chronicling femininity in her first book Women, Cohen indulges in the hyper-realistic through her iconographic exploration of the mundane.
In Cohen’s recently concluded solo exhibition at Jeffrey Deitch, Los Angeles titled HELLO, My Name Is, she presents a thematic showcase of photographic works from her monographs, Women (2021), and more recently published HELLO, My Name Is, alongside never-before-seen video works against a fictionalised backdrop of Los Angeles.
Nadia Lee Cohen, Women
Cohen spent six years creating and compiling the one hundred works presented under the title Women that she delivered to her audience on a small scale in her debut exhibition in the United States. Between 2014 and 2020, the British-born Los Angeles based artist can be seen to develop a narrative arc that speaks of both her thought-provoking skills as a storyteller and eye as a cinematographer.
Each image houses a perfectly posed figure, or figures, in varied levels of nudity, poised at the edge of a moment in Cohen’s fictionalised reality. She captures a scene, entirely fabricated by her mind, that holds a sense of events before and after the one she has chosen to display, using lighting, makeup, costume, and prosthetics to afford the heightened movie magic in the everyday tasks of the characters.
Hyper-surrealist pop iconography
This stylistic choice is aided by the artist’s star-studded list of sitters, including actress Alexa Demie and models Richie Shazam and Georgia May Jagger. Friends of Cohen’s, in real life, the celebrity of these individuals marries the glamour of cinematic mystery with the commonplace scenes in which Cohen sets her photographs. This is all part of the «hyper-surrealist pop iconography» her publisher, IDEA, identifies in her set up.
Staging fictional reality
«The world I photograph and create doesn’t reside in the same world that we live in» Cohen is quoted saying. As the viewer walks through the exhibition towards the back of the space, executed with the help of Cohen’s art director, Brittany Porter, accompanying film works light up a darkened theatre space. She invites her viewer to partake in an immersive experience of her work in three-dimension. Featuring a small rendering of the La Brea Motel, fitted with a window into the digitalised room of a lone guest. Included is also old-school red cinema seats surrounded by spilt popcorn amongst other props and furniture collected by the artist over several years.
A fictitious universe
While Cohen is not one to readily spell out the details of her narrative, the photographer’s lust for storytelling compels the exhibition’s revealing cinematic vision. For the first time, the subjects of pictures seen in Women play out scenes from the photographs and interview style recordings of HELLO, My Name Is characters have been televised on several monitors.
The accompanying film works for Women are presented as a triptych with three clocks geotagged above each screen: London, New York, and Los Angeles. For an apparently fictitious universe, Cohen nostalgically draws parallels between her luxe restoration of the mundane and the world her audience knows all too well. «You need not be considered shallow or superficial to hold fiction as valid as fact, or to think of oneself and others as characters in a film» Cohen explains, «you just want to make sure that the film you are in is a great one.» Ultimately, the success of Cohen’s narrative lies in the artist’s capacity to render a realistic world through a stimulating cinematic lens.
Transforming into 33 different personas
Cohen transforms herself into 33 different personas based on a collection of thrifted name tags for her second monograph, HELLO, My Name Is, which also graced the walls of Jeffrey Deitch. At first glance, these images appear to be a self-portrait of the artist in detailed hair, makeup, costume, and prosthetics, but the characters have depth and history that beg to be read beyond her.
The cast of characters that populate HELLO, My Name Is include a heavily made-up casino worker named Ivett, employed at the Reno Hilton; young Michael who carries around Playboy magazines and rolls of film; Mrs Fisher, a fuzzy browed British royalist in head-to-toe florals; and soft-faced Big Kat whose ‘World’s Greatest Grandma’ sign fits with the loose sweets amongst her possessions.
Lurid leftovers of Western consumerism
Each fictional character, portrayed by Cohen in their varying genders, age and size, has been inspired by name tags collected by the photographer, previously belonging to unknown individuals. Developed from an interest in flea markets and vintage stores, HELLO, My Name Is is described as the «lurid leftovers of Western consumerism» by the artist. Trivial, cheap, and painstakingly ordinary, the exhibition breathes importance into the candour of the everyman, a far cry from the world outside the doors of the gallery but also somehow well-balanced in the narrative tension it evokes.
Personifying the personal object
Cohen’s favourite character, Arby’s employee, Jeff, sits proudly for his portrait adorned in a beige three-piece suit, bolo tie and cowboy hat. The cigarette wedged between his fingers comes from a vintage pack of Camels displayed alongside other personal items including a tiny ‘World’s Greatest Dad’ trophy, a bottle of Pilsner and a campaign badge for Richard Nixon in a separate image. In her book, Cohen accompanies each portrait with a corresponding photograph of a collection of possessions she believes her characters would have owned.
The significance of objects
In reality, Jeff sits as a permanent visitor at the centre of the gallery touting Cohen’s meticulous attention to detail. Not too far away is the tray of imagined belongings assigned to him that make him even more realistic. Objects are significant in the process of world building that Cohen partakes in as she casts a transformative lens on forgotten artefacts of modern life in order to dignify her characters.
A TSA-style airport conveyor belt attached to a garment conveyor rotates a succession of each character’s personal effects beside the life-sized Jeff. Cohen’s reliance on props to relay her artistic vision comes full circle in this installation. She admits: «This was the first opportunity I had to show the work in a three-dimensional way, where people could experience isolated physical forms of the objects, characters, and Los Angeles architecture – all of which influenced me in the first place».
Cohen’s photo-based narrative non-deprecatingly points at the accumulation of personal belongings to show the viewer just how much we rely on consumer identity to disclose the most intimate parts of who we are. Paul Reubens (best known for playing Pee-Wee Herman) suggests «there’s more than a hint of obsession in what she does» – the collecting, the transforming, the embodying – and this comes across in her second monograph, an entirely relatable consumer dreamscape dedicated in print to «the 99c store manager».
Nadia Lee Cohen
Artist born in London and currently based in Los Angeles. An alumnus of London College of Fashion, Cohen is well known for her commercial work in music videos and fashion photography. She has worked with the likes of Tyler the Creator, Kali Uchis, and A$AP Rocky as a film director and commercially worked for fashion brands such as Balenciaga, Gucci and Schiaparelli. Cohen’s photographs and films have been inspired by Americana and Britain in the 1950s, 60s and 70s.
