Inscriptions of Time/Topographies of History: The Photographs of Alan Cohen

September 5 - December 7, 2003

Oval cobblestones form unbalanced patterns of triangles and rectangles. Seemingly ordinary pieces of asphalt at once signify and conceal former sites of historical trauma and violence. We see the ground of a desert criss-crossed by the impact of geological forces and callous climate conditions. Elusive shadows indicate the ghostly remains of the USS Arizona, a vessel destroyed during the attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941. And finally, we behold a riverbank just before it is flooded by the damming of the Yangtze River.

Alan Cohen's photographs document inscriptions of history, the traces of transient events and human initiatives, with the intention to make time readable. His images consistently direct our gaze downward from an eye-level perspective, asking us to become detective-like readers of something which was never intended to be written as such. Like a psychoanalyst, Cohen’s hope is to reveal the optical unconscious of our world--that is, the symptomatic expression of the past in visible figures of the present. The bareness of his images encourages us to look beyond what is merely visible and thus re-energize our experience of time, history, and ourselves.

Alan Cohen's photographs have been exhibited at the Art Institute of Chicago, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Block Museum of Art at Northwestern University, and the Literaturhaus Frankfurt (Germany), among others. Inscriptions of Time/Topographies of History provides a cross-section of his most recent work with selections from projects from the mid-1990s to spring 2003.

The exhibition was organized by guest curator Lutz Koepnick, Associate Professor of Germanic Languages and Literatures and Film & Media Studies at Washington University. Photographs appear courtesy of the artist.

Support for the exhibition was provided by the Regional Arts Commission, the Missouri Arts Council, and individual contributors to the Mildred Kemper Lane Art Museum.