Recption and Artist's Talk with Nancy Cohen: Hackensack Dreaming

Reception and Artist's Talk:
Third Friday Durham, February 19, 2016, 5p.m.-8p.m.
Artist's talk begins at 6p.m.

Exploring Nancy Cohen's large-scale installation Hackensack Dreaming is to enter a world constructed by the human hand through manipulation of raw materials, a parallel not unlike the reality of the Mill Creek Marsh in the Meadowlands of Secaucus, New Jersey, from which Cohen derives her inspiration. In a subtle, self-referential manner, the organic ingredients that constitute the handmade paper and glass - the major components in the installation - are documents of the natural world.

Cohen, a New Jersey resident, has spent the last decade following the waterways of New York and New Jersey, finding contradictions of nature in her urban environment. Cohen describes driving through some of the most congested, confusing, and visually unappealing parts of the state: "We park next to Bob's Discount Furniture warehouse amidst Secaucus's outlet malls. From the marshes we look out in one direction to a water treatment plant, in another toward Walmart. We can hear the cars on the New Jersey Turnpike. Beyond the worst of some mash-up of urban suburbia we can see the Empire State Building." The malls, highways, and skyline of New York form the backdrop to an organic world: the Mill Creek Marsh, in the Meadowlands of NJ. Isolated amid a sea of human-made structures, the landscape is quiet and deserted.