Aleesa Cohene

Aleesa Cohene (born 1976 in Vancouver) is a Canadian visual artist based in Los Angeles.

Cohene's practice explores appropriation in media arts, sculpture, and scent, reflecting on broader conversations around the production and circulation of cultural material. Cohene typically works with found materials, scavenging, replicating, and remixing images, sounds, and objects. Their work explores the questions these practices provoke—about transgression, intervention, cultural appropriation, ownership, property, and power.

Their work has been shown in major Canadian museums and galleries in multiple provinces including The Power Plant (Ontario), Contemporary Calgary, MacKenzie Art Gallery (Saskatchewan), and Confederation Centre Art Gallery (PEI). They have been awarded residencies in Canada, the U.S., Denmark, and the Netherlands, and their work has screened internationally. The 2017 project I Don't Get It was commissioned by three major Canadian institutions (The Western Front, The Rooms, and Gallery 44 Centre for Contemporary Photography) for a solo exhibition tour across Canada. Cohene's work is part of the permanent collection of Oakville Galleries, and has been acquired by private collectors.

In 2021, Cohene founded the multidisciplinary creative agency I Know You Know, which works with arts and cultural institutions, artists, scholars and culturally conscious businesses and brands. The agency works with a team of international artists and designers to produce visual identities, digital projects, publications, and environments.

Education

Cohene studied at York University (Philosophy and Religion) and the Toronto Film School (Editorial). Cohene also holds a Master's of Visual Studies from the University of Toronto (2013).

Film and video work Cohene began producing video art in the early 2000s and was quickly recognized for their early work with awards such as the 2004 Images Festival “Best Emerging Artist” Award and Impakt Festival's “Most Remarkable Production” Award. Building from a methodologically constructed archive they have been assembling since the 2000s, Cohene has become known for their expertly edited audiovisual collages, telling oblique, strongly atmospheric stories.

Cohene's work often explores queer identity, race, intimacy, capitalism, and the ways political identities and experiences of injustice bear on human relationships.

Cohene's practice also includes installations, sculptural work, scent-based art, and dance performances that are often presented in relation to their video work.

Olfactory and performance art

Cohene describes the evolution of working with scent in their practice as a way to address embodied emotions and ideas that cannot be easily translated visually. Many of their exhibition environments include scent, such as in the projects Like Like (2009), That's Why We End (2012), I Know You Know (2014), and I Don't Get It (2017).

From 2013 to 2016, Cohene worked in collaboration with German dancers Jared Gradinger and Angela Schubot, producing a dance work that toured in Berlin, Mannheim, and Toronto. In 2016, the group developed and presented the work at Gallery TPW, in Toronto, Canada in a residency with theorist and filmmaker Eric Cazdyn.

In 2015, Cohene was invited to learn and perform Yvonne Rainer's choreography Transmitting Trio A (1966), along with a mixed group of dance and performance artists. Cohene also regularly collaborates with dancers and choreographers including Canadian choreographer Ame Henderson, dancer Mairi Greig, and dancers/choreographers Jared Gradinger and Angela Schubot. They were awarded the 2012 Artist Award from the Toronto Friends of the visual Arts, and have been the recipient of multiple grants and awards from the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council. They were a finalist for the 2020 Barbara Hammer Grant, an award for experimental filmmakers supported by the estate of Barbara Hammer.