Oreen Cohen

This group of large scale paintings on canvas are combinations of my drawing and painting practice. A play with texture, form, sheen and matte- they are re-iterations of the body in pain, in decay and transformation. Made using Latex paint, household chemicals, organic matter (palm fibers, needles, leaves, twings) stains, paper, wax, charcoal, pastel, graphite, marble dust, powders and grit. Influences while working on these paintings is selected writings of Kahlil Gibran from “The Madman”, Joan Miro “The Escape Ladder”, Works by Tracy Emins and Arnulf Rainer. These paintings were also a study in Matte vs. Sheen, grit vs. texture while controlling the combination of finishes.

All works made during a residency at the Joan Mitchell Foundation Fall 2023.

Earth Body Painting Series is a study in two realms- two sides. Working the canvas from the horizontal and vertical position, forms switch between body and landscape. I re-imagine wartorn and fertile lands from my childhood in Israel, mapped with recollection of current news images.

For instance, the painting, NOVA is the sunrise at 6:30 am in Southern Israel the morning of the October 7th attacks starting at the Nova Festival. One can see a sunrise over a rocky desert or a female form dancing with another, or a female form being ravaged with the light escaping her.

I will be continuing this series of work in 2024.

The States of Mind series is a collection of 113 8”x8” canvas paintings. Each individual canvas is layered and labored with Latex paint, Household chemicals, oil/chalk pastels, marble grit, rust, and stains. Generally created in sets of 6, each work stands alone as capsulations of a particular moment, physical and/or emotional state, made in one sitting. The series allowed me to push myself and the paint - to build a “cook book” of how to achieve textures with combinations of material- these lessons will and have been utilized in large scale works. The edges of the canvas are coated in paraffin wax and black oil pastel. These works were created during a Fall 2023 residency at the Joan Mitchell Foundation. The series was sustainably created saving car loads of paint, stains and chemicals from disposal at The Green Project, New Orleans.

1 . Elemental Seasons: Fall/Water
Scrap metal, steel, stained glass,
slag glass, semi-precious stone,
Private commission, Squirrel Hill
Pittsburgh, PA

2. Elemental Seasons: Winter/Air
Scrap metal, steel, stained glass,
slag glass, semi-precious stone,
Private commission, Squirrel Hill
Pittsburgh, PA

3. Elemental Seasons: Spring/Earth
Scrap metal, steel, stained glass,
slag glass, semi-precious stone,
Private commission, Squirrel Hill
Pittsburgh, PA

4. Elemental Seasons: Summer/Fall
Scrap metal, steel, stained glass,
slag glass, semi-precious stone,
Private commission, Squirrel Hill
Pittsburgh, PA

Installed Emerald Green Park- in Anchor Green Garden at the Intersection of PJ McCardle Parkway and Grandview ave. Pittsburgh PA. Commissioned by the City of Pittsburgh made possible by the RAD Grant. Date of completion: Nov 11, 2022

Video documenting the work created by Sandra Bacchi https://youtu.be/a6M2Eb-exA8

OLOIDS (Sculptures)

Steel, Resin, Dye, hanging hardware, 3D printed stain glass lines.

AXIS (Window panels)
Acrylic, Resin

Installed October 2021

OLOIDS brings art, science, beauty and technology together. Collaborating with Students, Staff and Faculty at the School. I was able to utilize the technologies on campus to create these works. My goal was to bring a sense of wonder and curiosity about the possibilities these students have at hand with the resources provided to them, I used 3D printing for line work, cutting acrylic sheets with a laser cutter, CNC plasma cutting hardware to welding fabrication. From digital design to final install, the school community played a major role in it’s creation- my anticipation is that the artwork plays a similar role in the students daily trajectory- by adding a little levity through light and color.

More info…

The steel armatures for the chandelier sculptures is inspired by Oloid shape. The oloid is an intriguing and widely unknown geometric shape with amazing mathematical and aesthetic properties. It was discovered in 1929 by German sculptor, inventor and mathematician Paul Schatz. It is described as “a skeletal frame made by placing two linked congruent circles in perpendicular planes, so that the center of each circle lies on the edge of the other circle. The distance between the circle centers equals the radius of the circles.” A perfectly engineered shape that rolls symmetrically.

In my research on 3D printing processes, I discovered I could print stained glass lead lines. In researching mathematical designs, I came across an elementary math lesson on X and Y coordinates that maps out slope equations in a stain glass pattern. Math can be challenging to conceptualize, so teachers use the Slope Stained Glass Window art project to bring the concept of slope to life. I thought this was interesting in 2 ways: 1: making abstract math concepts physical and aesthetic, and 2: early math and physics classes must have inspired the engineers of today to be in the positions they are in, just in the same way my school art classes left an impression on me to become an artist and a youth educator.

I teamed up with the Mathematics department students and Dean to create automatic graphs representing equations of X and Y slopes and quadratic equations. These graphed lines will then become the stained glass lead lines. The negative spaces will be filled with colored resin to give a faux stained glass finish that will be used in the sculptures as well as staircase window panels. This work is in production and will be installed September 1, 2021.

Many thanks to The Dean of Department of Engineering Maria Kalevitch, Project coordinator Andrea Plummer, Production and Laboratory Engineer- Gabe Cotrell, Student engagement coordinator Sarah Moore and to the many students that helped to develop designs.

WIGHTMAN PARK PUBLIC ART UNVEILED IN SQUIRREL HILL

Video Interview: https://youtu.be/dCesFM-vThQ

Wednesday October 28, 2020 1:00 pm (Pittsburgh, PA) – The Public Art & Civic Design Division (PACD) of the Department of City Planning is pleased to announce the unveiling of a large public art project in the newly renovated Wightman Park in Squirrel Hill.

The free-standing sculptures were designed and fabricated by artists Oreen Cohen and Alison Zapata of OOA Designs. OOA DESIGNS is a woman owned and operated artist collaboration between founders Oreen Cohen and Alison Zapata, established in 2018. They create aesthetic and functional public art that embraces color, forms and nature within their collaborative work. OOA developed, produced, and fabricated the Wightman Park sculptures between 2018-2020.

This City of Pittsburgh project was administered by PACD in collaboration with the Department of Public Works and Council District 8. The artists were selected through an RFP process, and have been working with the Department of Public Works and Pashek + MTR to install the artwork.

Cohen and Zapata incorporated Wightman Park’s water and pollinator conservancy initiatives while also considering the history of the site as a glass manufacturing plant. The four large-scale sculptures of this installation are inspired by a waterfall, a bee hive, and pollinator insects. The works, titled Cascade (the bench), Transform, Pollinate, and Illuminate (the bugs), use a zero-waste model that incorporates laser cut stainless steel to reflect the park’s nature and new storm water run-off design.

During meetings held by Council and the City, the community expressed wanting to see Wightman Park represented as a historical site of the Lorenz and Wightman Glass manufacturers. To commemorate this, eleven plates of dichroic borosilicate glass are inserted into the negative boulder shapes of the large waterfall sculpture. These glass pieces were purchased from the last standing glass production facility in Pittsburgh, Jeanette Glass. These fine details to the final aesthetic of the sculptures adds dimension not only to the artwork but activates the park as a reflective and welcoming site that incorporates the visions of community, history, and its future. OOA partnered with the Pittsburgh Glass Center, glass artist Ashley McFarland, and Protohaven Makerspace in the production of this work.

OOA Designs’ intentions in designing these sculptures was to fabricate considerate aesthetic designs that build connections with the immediate environment, communities, and functions of place. The no-waste process incorporates often discarded pieces into their concepts. Made in collaboration with a local Pittsburgh industrial facility, the production of the laser-cut stainless steel created negative and positive organic shapes. The “drops” or “fall outs” that normally are scraped were used to create three of the sculptures.

In December of 2019, OOA ran a workshop using the drop cuts from a small scale wooden model to work with the young students at the Community Day School across the street from the park. The children puzzled together the pieces into what inspired the creation of the pollinator bugs. In the fabrication process, OOA used the steel drop pieces to create the three pollinator bugs (a butterfly, a bee, and a lighting bug) to be placed in the meadow areas of the park. Now, the children playing in the park will be able to remember that their vision had a part in creating these monumental works of art.

FOR MORE INFORMATION

Oreen Cohen

Lead Project Artist, Designer, Fabricator

OOA Designs

585-732-8885

ooadesigns@gmail.com

Alizon Zapata

Co-Founder and Collaborator, OOA Designs

Anthony Cavalline

Arts, Culture, and History Specialist

Anthony.Cavalline@pittsburghpa.gov

Andrew Dash

Director of City Planning

Andrew.Dash@pittsburghpa.gov

Project made in collaborative partnership with the Pittsburgh Department of Public Works (Andrea Ketzel, project manager), Pashtek MTR (Architectural Firm), EvolvEA (Landscaping), Pittsburgh Glass Center (working artist Ashley Mcfarland), Protohaven Makerspace (Pittsburgh, PA).

For more process images please visit: Instagram @oco.art

In Between Here Flows is a site-specific sculptural installation that graphs the kinematic movement of bird wing movements in flight and landing. The
lines are drawn in over 2,000 feet of hand-bent
steel rebar. The negative space is filled with multi-colored gels offering a stream colorful shadows across the rigid terminal architecture.

Over 2000 ft (1/2 ton) of Hand bent Rebar, Spray paint, Theatre gels 140 ft (L) x 13 ft (w) x 10 ft (height)

Location: Brooklyn Army Terminal

“When Artists Enter the Factories” Curated by Jia-Jen Lin , Curatorial advisor- Srinivas Aditya Mopidevi

Oct 18- Nov 22, 2019

Sponsored by the New York City Economic Development Corporation (NYCEDC)

Project support from: Greater Pittsburgh Arts Council Artist Opportunity Grant

All original designs based off of alchemical and transformation narratives. Rough designed digitally and intuitively assembled.

1. “When Fire chanced to mingle with the breath of the earth” 27” x 21.5”

2. “Crossing Hands” 32” x 32” stained glass

3. “Seeded between the realms of day and night”

   70.5 x105.5” floor mosaic

4. “Backed against a fall” 70.5” x 47” table top

5. “ESH menorah” 12” x 6” x 4”

6. “Butterfly” 14”x8”

Theatre Lighting Gels, Gaffer’s Tape and existing girder structure at the Carrie Furnace Historic Site, Rivers of Steel Pittsburgh, PA

Various Dimensions
Alloy Pittsburgh Residency 2015

Spectre and Shade is a faux stained glass installation laminated in the negative space of the girders enclosing the dust catcher near Furnace 7.  The work illuminates atmospheric and physical sensations when our views are projected upwards encountering the grandeur of this industrial ruin. The weighty obsolescence of the industrial past consumes, with its now diminished status provoking a reverie that counteracts and ultimately undermines linear notions of progress. As nostalgia entwines with progress, the bygone comes face to face with its own potential to surmount itself.  The intentions become part of a new perceptions seen through a contemporary lens, ending earlier forms of modernity.

Spectre and Shade is a gesture towards making desires of progress a conscious, transparent and physical act. The gravitational realities of physical space envelop in a compelling comparison between the substantial gravity of the Furnace and the ethereal space it occupies.  The bodily self contributes to and is implicated by the physical matter of its surroundings as the work arbitrates between the metaphysical and historical materiality.

Col(our) is a action/reaction one night performance between artist Oreen Cohen, Performance Artist Zil Ricker and First Friday Garfield Arts District Gallery Crawl Visitors un-expecting participants. Visitor participation immediately happened as we collectively engaged with the rudimentary task of layering color after color changing the hues within a collaborative faux stained glass tapestry.

Event held at Level UP Studios during Black Thought VS. Black Star Event.

Many Thanks to Mario Quinn and lovely family, Jason Mendez, Amani Davus, Zil Ricker and Scott Bye. 

Series of small to medium size drawings made in charcoal, washable marker and Gouache from 5” x5” - 24” x48” created during the early stages of the Covid-19 pandemic.

“Darkest Dark” is an ongoing series of large scale charcoal works on paper built up with residual marks from aggressive automatic drawing. I strike the surface with boundless energy thrashing to heavy metal music pushing the possibilities of mark making. Broad strokes are stressed between states of fatigue and empowerment both balanced by the weight of scrubbed charcoal to its darkest depth while its cathartic erasure provides levity and form. Usually completed in one feverous action, each piece develops distinct worlds of their own, reflecting repressed narratives that wrench out from personal states of trauma, that also seem inescapably part of our contemporary environment.

Archival Mixed Media Paper, Charcoal, eraser, water, white and grey pastel
Dimensions vary: 48" x 78" to  68"-96" or 60” x 120”

Hand bent Rebar
Various dimensions

Contempraneous exhibition, Curated by Tara Fay, Associated Artists of Pittsburgh, PA 11/2017

Found candles (collected from local churches and birthdays etc), scavenged rebar.

Created for the exhibition “This Sacred Thing” SPACE Gallery, Pittsburgh PA (postponed due to COVID 19)

2019-2020

A play with an abundance of half used found wax candles and contorted rebar I furthered melded the materials into a sculptural series. Thinking about the body though art history, upheld on a pedestal, contours of stone, reserved. Here the as a relic, made of predominantly used church candles and discarded rebar that used to reinforce concrete. “The body is a temple” they say, yet I see it and feel it as encumbered with pain with each injury and with age, weathering and withering with each transformation.

Installation work created at Bunker Projects, Pittsburgh, PA

Exhibit dates: May 3rd-June 2nd, 2019

SUADE is a multi-media installation that uses manipulated found objects that build a narrative about loyalty. An exhausted horse “BRUTE MARE” is the center piece of the installation depicting one of the five Arabian mares that, sprinting toward the oasis to quench days of thirst, turned to heed the battle call Mohammad cried out. The kinetic candle sculpture “SEMASH” burns at both ends and teeters as the candle drips wax onto rag paper. The encompassing work questions, as Bunker Project Board member Anna Nelson states: What are we called to by our bodies? What are we called to do because of our loyalties?

https://www.bunkerprojects.org/suade.html

Review: https://www.bunkerprojects.org/review/oreen-cohens-suade-exhaustion-loyalty-and-endurance

UNFURL:  A Painting and Sculpture Installation
 August 30- October 21, 2018

To unfurl is to make or become spread out from a rolled or folded state, especially in order to be open to the wind.

With the above definition in mind, I approached the making of new work for the Summer 2018 residency at Pittsburgh Center for Creative Reuse. The work is a visual narrative of the unfurling or mutation of materials through action and collage. My work began with salvaging materials from Creative Reuse, Construction Junction, the junkyard and local dumpsters; and it is within the act of salvaging that I begin to envision possible formations. Inspired by the mountain of baskets at PCCR, hot air balloons, dioramas and natural disasters I began to construct.

In the studio, each sculpture started with a tomato cage as an armature. Becoming familiar with each materials properties, I worked along with how it wanted to bend, warp or transform. The Painting backdrop further breaks down the forms in the sculptures in six separate series consisting of 6 paintings. Processes such as weaving, layering, twisting and collage became the visual connector between the sculptures and paintings. The wholeness of the installation represents the unfurling of potential creative actions when provided the space and resources to evolve.
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Thank you to the generosity, support and inspiration of Pittsburgh Center for Creative Reuse staff, volunteers and customers during the residency and years of being an inspired shopper, as well as the Joan Mitchell Foundation for Emergency Support.

Thank you to Construction Junction ReGive Program for reclaimed wood.

Support for this program is generously provided by Pennsylvania Council for the Arts Learn more at www.pccr.org

Between a Stone and a Shrine is a 7 channel video performance and installation visually narrating a social allegory depicting the story of a gilded casket being delivered and buried in a post-industrial town of Braddock, PA. The work illustrated an urgent need to transformation of space into a place of meaning. 

The story evolved from an random encounter with Harold, a resident of Braddock who maintained abandoned lots around his neighborhood by planting sunflowers each spring, and mowing over them digging the seeds deeper in the dirt. 

Other sources of inspiration provide the visuals for this work: the opening scene of the 1960 Federico Fellini film, La Dolce Vita, which is a statue of Jesus is being airlifted over Rome. The Hebrew proverb, “No one will make you a casket made of gold,”  meaning that no one will ever fully appreciate your labor, so you must work for yourself to leave a legacy.

The film employs religious iconography to signify a resurrection of hope at a time when it was integral to return to the past in order to invent future prosperity. I am appropriating these sources and subverting them by using universal symbols of a casket, seeds, and a procession to create a legacy emphasizing death as a transition and not a finality. The way in which Harold perpetuated the growth of sunflowers, even after their death. 

The burial of this casket in an abandoned lot was directed as a collaborative event. The story begins with Part I: The Gilding Workshop, arranged with the Braddock Youth Project where participants assisted a Master gilder to gild a wooden casket at the Braddock Community Center. Part II: The Procession illustrates the preparation and labor involved with the burial, the demolition of a home, and the final Procession with the Golden Casket. 

Come spring, a field of sunflowers sprung from above the burial site. 

The project was supported in part by funding from the Carnegie Mellon University Frank-Ratchye Fund For Art @ the Frontier, CMU Graduate Research Funding.

Silo: 9 ft diameter circle x 12 ft tall, 4,000 hand made salt dough bread bricks, wheat paste, 150 lbs of screws, florescent lights, steel door, built at the former Nabisco Factory (Bakery Square) in Pittsburgh, PA

Intervention: To be demolished list, vacant properties, wheat paste, various dimensions

The installation “Between You, Me and The Wall” is a play with landscape, memory and a politicized evocation of economic history through material and process.

Repetition as insistence is the constant pressure of something hidden but not forgotten.  I have mixed two tons of flour, one ton of rock salt and water to bake over 4,000 loaves of salt dough bread bricks. The prevalent physicality and materiality in the construction of the silo refers to and honors industrial laborers that shaped the rust belt region. The work evolved into a guerilla graffiti intervention where I used the bricks to rebuild buildings on ‘To Be Demolished’ lists around the Rust Belt areas of Pittsburgh, PA, Buffalo and Rochester, NY. The gesture harkens to a past invested in physical labor and is a visualization of the sweat equity encased within the bricks of our built environment- only constructed to become demolished as everything is built for obsolescence.

Salvaged steel, HVAC pipes, fresnel lens, satellite dishes, mirrors, auto glass, resin, reflective tape, bearings, steel turntable

3,500 sq.  ft/ variable dimensions

Commissioned for FIGMENT summer long sculpture project Governors Island, NYC

A Sharper Lens is a battery of sculptures built out of discarded materials illustrating a battle between a constructed artillery cannon and an Iron Dome. While alluding to Governors Island’s military history, these pieces of “military equipment” actually function as kinetic Kaleidoscopes. Through imagination, visitors can engage in a battle of perceptions projecting kaleidoscopic views onto the landscape.

60 sheets Salvaged broken auto glass, steel book ends, abandoned railroad track

150 ft x 4 ft 8 in

Temporary work Commissioned for Free City, Flint Public Art Project, Flint, Michigan

Desiring Production is a site-specific temporary installation built out of broken car windshields and steel book ends locally sourced from Flint, MI. The windshields were propped up like dominos stretched across the length of the railroad tracks at the abandoned Chevy Commons, where the old Chevrolet Automobile Plant stood until 1982. At the ends of the line of windshields were mirrors to enhance the effect to create an infinity-scape, harkening to the mass production lines of the once Chevy automobile plant. Throughout the two-day festival, the windshields weight beared down on themselves and slowly cracking and slouching down causing a chain reaction or wave like pattern illustrating through movement and material the entropic cyclical nature of industry. This work was constructed in one week and existed for two days for the Free City festival and was deconstructed.

5,000 hand-bent steel roses, wax, wood lathe, auto glass.
Collaborator Tim Reid,Sound Engineer
Hallway- 9 ft x 42" x12 ft

Light room- 9ft x 9ft x 12 ft

Any Where But Here, Group Exhibition Whitdel Arts Gallery, Detroit, MI

Day/Break:Ground/Break is an interactive sculpture. As the 5,000 hand-bent steel roses are walked on, they shuffle and clank together emanating a tin like sound with each footstep. The roses seem like they would not be sturdy as they are made of thin 22­ gauge steel, however, collectively packed together they hold their strength.

Viewers cautiously walk on the roses and mind the molding dough and wood walls as they shuffle and clank together emanating a tin-like sound with each footstep.  These sounds will be picked up by contact and condenser mics that are hidden underneath the platform and transmitted to the other side of the dividing wall, where in the next space, globes of broken autoglass glow, emanating cracks along the concrete floors and ceiling.  Speakers are hidden inside this ceiling with a Rumpshaker subwoofer, where the sound from the roses is collected and builds up over itself into a crescendo of visitors footsteps.

Through personally enduring the labor of cutting and hand bending the steel roses, this piece speaks to a poem, ‘Bread and Roses’ by James Oppenheim, which was used as a slogan during the textile strike in Lawrence, Massachusetts, 1912.  The prevalent physicality in the work refers to and honors the industrial labor unionizing efforts, reminding us that we are not autonomous from processes of production (even if currently waning) that shaped and still affect our present culture and its relative affluence.

Quote from Bread and Roses by James Oppenheim:
As we come marching, marching, unnumbered women dead
Go crying through our singing their ancient cry for bread.
Small art and love and beauty their drudging spirits knew. 
Yes, it is bread we fight for – but we fight for roses, too.

Building Bridges was an opportunity to translate a private practice into a public work with a shared collective value. The project's directives met at the intersection of memory and placemaking; to open a larger dialogue about visions of progress and forced change in Pittsburgh's Northside neighborhoods of East Deutschtown and East Allegheny. 

My research developed into a series of 56 hand-cut photo collages illustrating a narrative timeline of community sourced photographs. Collage designs are comprised of photographs  of the neighborhood before and after the highway construction donated by long time residents and Allegheny City Historic Gallery, coupled with contemporary photographs of development on the Northside. The storytelling and symbol-making components of the collages communicates a vision of what matters, or ought to matter, in our environments with the goal of propagating stories of local history through community engagement and adaptive public art initiatives. 

Press

"Oreen Cohen: Building Bridges," By Libbie Katsev, The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette July 17, 2016
http://www.post-gazette.com/ae/art-architecture/2016/07/17/Oreen-Cohen-Building-bridges/stories/201607170005

Support

Honored to be supported by The Pittsburgh Foundation and Heinz Endowments Investing in Professional Artists Program and The Sprout Fund One Northside grant

While scavenging for materials, on construction and demolition sites, I photograph the machines, industrial refuse and organic textures for the collage series ‘Interchangeable Parts.’ I intricately hand cut the negative space out of the photos extracting 2D objects and material. The collage series began as a studio practice to sketch for proposals, document old works, or realize impossible sculptures.