Atria: Sedona Cohen

Buffalo Prescott and Trotter&Sholer are pleased to present Atria by Sedona Cohen at NADA East Broadway’s gallery space. The artist’s first solo exhibition will be on view November 14, 2024 through December 7, 2024. Following in the footsteps of artists who have explored mysticism and theosophy, Cohen’s practice situates the exploration of the inexplicable squarely in the purview of a contemporary artist and young woman. Informed by a sense of wonder and devotion, the works act as protective talismans, tour guides simultaneously of consciousness and place. Cohen’s practice is a personal exercise in alchemy. Her works compress time and realities into a symbolic visual language. They invite the viewer to engage in her exploration of mysticism and find space for meditation, healing, and introspection.

Cohen describes her works as evolving systems, endless wells of energetic and visual information emanating from a mysterious divine source. Inspired by her childhood in the wilderness of Colorado and as a young adult in the jungles of Costa Rica, Cohen’s works are rooted in ideas of place and time. Much like exploring mountains or jungles, her paintings are investigations of the self and its relationship to broader realty. They fold space-time into itself, connecting the natural landscape with human-built structures; the ancient world with modern technology. They speak to human experiences that are difficult to describe or even understand.

Her carvings represent a development in her practice and language that help to elucidate the visual language she is developing. Through her traditional painting exploration, Cohen’s works developed and evolved from figures into a purely symbolic language on her current body of wood reliefs, which creates a set of themes in dialogue. The inscriptions on these works are reminiscent of sacred geometry, the same geometry used in the design and construction of temples, mosques, churches, and monuments.

For Cohen, art is about interchange. She invites the viewer into her deeply personal investigation as an Atria presents four oil-on-canvas paintings and six hand-carved oil-on-fiberboard sculptures, and marks a desire to aid others in their process of understanding the ways in which reality(s), time, and circumstance intersect.

Through a painting process that alternates between calculated meticulousness and intuitive meditation, she creates spaces where self-sustaining ecosystems thrive. Cohen constructs a set of symbols and forms which evolve at a pace similar to that of a flower blooming or a seed sprouting. She explores how a painting can be a parallel world, a meditation, a calculation, a living organism, a system of networks, storage for information, a tool for posing questions and seeking answers, and a time traveler.