Orly Cogan & Nicholas Knight
Steven Wolf Fine Arts
San Francisco, CA
3 May - 23 June 2007

by Tonya Warner

Nicholas Knight has covered the walls of the project room at Steven Wolf with something of a relic of an older educational system: the sentence diagram.   Each wall is consumed by a single, spidery, large scale diagram done in vinyl lettering with the remnants of pencil guidelines lingering beneath.   But the point of the piece (because this space should really be thought of as a whole), is not the almost forgotten model of sentence diagramming, but how this form allows the carefully selected quotes to be broken down, dissected.   Here, on two facing walls, sit the combined diagrams of a quote by Jacques Derrida, alongside one by Henry James.   On each one is in French (grey) and one in English (black).   They read, "To read between the lines is easier than to follow the text" / "Il est plus facile de livre entre les lignes que de suivre le texte" (Henry James) and "Il n'y a pas de hors-texte" / "There is nothing outside the text" (Jacques Derrida).   One can already see, just from the combination of these two quotes, not only the pun inherent in their visual form, but the theoretical dialogue.   I feel that the James quote speaks more to our tendency towards quick interpretation based on our own pool of knowledge, while Derrida warns against the potential pitfalls of such actions.   I.e., the two quotes are not necessarily at odds, as they first might appear (or are they?).   The real object here is to get the viewer to think - to analyze.   Somehow, I feel that having the quotes diagrammed out (and therefore made more of a struggle to read) further enforces this.

The third wall is adorned with a quote by John Lehmann, "To talk about translation is rather like talking about the glass in front of a picture."   This, of course, adds an additional layer to the Derrida/James conversation, wherein one pairing features each quote in its original language and the other in translation.   I can only hope that the Lehmann quote is presented as a point to be contested, as there are debates among scholars even with the translation Knight uses for "Il n'y a pas de hors-texte" (not to mention what is "lost in translation").   (see here for a discussion).

Here, like in many conceptual works, the aesthetic element is almost incidental - the stylization serves only as a springboard for discussion - however, it is integral to the piece, as much so as the evidence of the process involved in its design.   All of Knight's work seems to follow a Goethe quote he used in a previous piece - "Thinking is more interesting than knowing but less interesting than looking."

Orly Cogan

Orly Cogan transforms vintage printed fabrics and found embroideries into tableaux of personal memories.   The images are jumbled together, the new rarely addressing the old and instead overlaps or drowns it out.   Drawing from a boldly outlined stitching style reminiscent of children's pillow cases and aprons of old, Cogan chooses to add washes of paint to flesh out the figures.   This helps, in some ways, to keep the picture from dissolving into a jumble of lines and stitches.   The figures - mostly nude and mostly Cogan herself - jockey for our attention on many of the pieces, creating a visual cacophony and reflecting scattered and fractured memories.   Cogan, on her website, says the work is inspired by relationships and personal mythologies as well as our constantly shifting boundaries of identity.

In a city where a prominent art school has recently dropped the word "craft" from its name due to certain negative connotations, I suppose a note about handicraft is necessary.   The fact that she stitches, rather than simply painting, can be read two-fold:   firstly, Cogan is reclaiming a historically womanly past time in the name of feminism - redefining female self expression (albeit in a vocabulary that has been almost overused).   Secondly, by incorporating similar techniques and styles, the artist draws a direct connexion to the now forgotten women who decorated and/or used the pieces of fabric that she has appropriated.

Thus, both Knight and Cogan have taken what was once completely banal and mundane but now seems antiquated, and transformed these forms into vehicles for contemporary theory.   Both encourage a rethinking of much debated topics - be it canonical tropes or a feminist critique of the construction of identity; one is cold and cerebral, the other tactile and exhibitionistic.   Both, though dealing with well-worn territory, however, are able to keep their respective content fresh and thought-provoking.

http://www.stevenwolffinearts.com/dynamic/exhibit_artist.asp?ExhibitID=46

http://www.stevenwolffinearts.com/dynamic/exhibit_artist.asp?ExhibitID=54

http://www.orlycogan.com/

http://nicholasknight.net/pages/diagram5.html

Do you want to add your thoughts? Email us at percolatormag@gmail.com and we’ll put them below.