Orly Cogan "Bending Over Backwards"

Orly Cogan was educated at The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art in NYC and The Maryland Institute College of Art. She has a BFA majoring in painting. Cogan has been exhibiting her work throughout the US and in Europe for over two decades and has been using fiber based materials in her art since the 1990ies.

Cogan has been included in a number of notable national and international museum and university exhibitions, including The Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art, CT, The Museum of Arts & Design, NY, which holds her work in its permanent collection in addition to The MIT collection and others, Riverside Museum, Riverside, CA, The Hudson River Museum, NY, The Textile Museum of Toronto, Canada, with Judy Chicago, The Brattleboro Museum VT, San Jose Museum of Quilts & Textiles, Woodson Art Museum, Wausau, WI, Fresno Metropolitan Museum,CA, The Musee International Des Arts Modeste, Sete, France, The Rijswijk Textile Biennial in The Museum Rijswijk and at The Museum of Decorative Arts and Design, Oslo among others. Cogan’s work is found in various public and private collections and she has also curated several acclaimed group exhibitions in NYC.

Artist Statement:

"The tableaux I create are inspired by relationships. Searching for that odd thing, the Feminist Beauty Queen, I mix subversion with flirtation, humor with power, and intimacy with frivolity. I start with vintage and printed fabrics, updating the original purpose while honoring the labors of the past. The fabric becomes the foundation for a surreal, fantastical exploration. By hand, with a mostly dotted line, I stitch figures into dream-like mythological narratives. The juxtaposition of vintage feminine and contemporary feminism is a rich contrast that gives the work much of its unique strength, complexity and frank vulnerability. The actors are present in the way a child perceives the world, wholehearted, engaged, uninhibited and reliant on the senses.

My work consists of a host of characters, primarily female protagonists with a sprinkle of their male consorts. The Goddess-like heroines inhabit a domestic space of agency as they appear in varying sizes and hierarchies playing out their power struggles with the language of visual symbolism, surrealism and ripe with art history references. My scenes are dream-like and live within a fantasy world rooted in the domestic with romanticism sewn in with a pastel pallet and veiled overlapping images that ooze emotional moments. Each stitch points to the next in a slow lingering line that ask the viewer to take their time looking. The characters often live in limbo between a public and private realm, simultaneously acting as subject and object and leading with broad emotional issues like rejection, notions of value, power plays within social dynamics, love, fear, desire, isolation, and finding beauty within the mundane. Changes in the tenor of cultural expression between then and now, and in conflating today’s brand of cultural confessionalism with yesteryear’s saccharin conservatism, the work encapsulates a sweeping arc of feminist storytelling." - Orly Cogan