American Versailles Print

Nicole Cohen is an American installation artist, who works with video and new media in order to explore issues of how interior design and architecture reveals aspects of portraiture and identity. Cohen's video works often include interiors from vintage magazines, period rooms, that reveal an intervention with technology of surveillance use or video projection overlay. She uses photography and creates a video animation on top of the past image. She uses video to transform and alter interior designed and architectural spaces. She explores ideas of perception and surveillance through her projects. Her influences stem from film/cinematic theory and the physical experience of immersion. Her work is positioned at the crossroads of contemporary reality, personal fantasy, and culturally constructed space. Although, trained in painting and drawing, Cohen most frequently uses video as her medium, playing upon intrinsic capacities to manipulate time, distort scale and environment, and overlay imagery. Consistently interested in engaging her audience and challenging the notions of lifestyle, domesticity, celebrity, and social behavior, Cohen also uses the surveillance camera to involve viewers in their own voyeurism. – Getty Museum, “Please Be Seated”, Solo Commissioned Video Installation, 2007–09, from brochure publication.