The Pit is pleased to present Peacock in the Sands, a solo exhibition by New York based artist Jennifer Paige Cohen.  The exhibition will run from September 8th to October 19, 2019, with an opening reception on Sunday September 8th from 4-7 pm.  The exhibition will be installed in our intimate Pit II gallery, and will include architectural interventions of the unique space with two plinths installed bilaterally in the gallery, each coming out of the adjacent wall. These two horizontally positioned plinths will have a new series of Cohen’s plaster and fabric sculptures presented on them.  The back wall of the gallery has also been painted an accent color that highlights the pallet of the textiles embedded in the sculptures.  The exhibition will consist of six of Cohen’s new bright colored, modestly scaled sculptures.  This will be Jennifer Paige Cohen’s first solo exhibition in Los Angeles. 

The works in Peacock in the Sands continue Cohen’s investigations into abstraction, gesture, color, and her use of found clothing as a central material. In this work Cohen takes used clothing, often given to her by family and friends, into the studio where they are worn and then used to make plaster casts from her own body. These frozen gestures of the figurative form ultimately become abstracted structures of soft white plaster contrasting with the brightly colored fabrics embedded within.  The small-scale sculptures are a compression of garment and human body.  Although the end result lives in the realm of abstraction, their relationship to the body imbues them with elements of self-portraiture, and opens investigations about how our bodies change, what it means to preserve an ever changing subject, and ultimately the fragility of our bodies and the stages of life.  This latest series of works emphasize cycles of regeneration; the sculptures resemble casts discarded after they are used to set broken bones. Peacock in the Sands alludes to the Phoenix, an archetypal symbol for renewal or rebirth.

Jennifer Paige Cohen lives and works in New York. She received her Master of Fine Arts from Yale University School of Art, New Haven CT and her Bachelors Degree from Bates College, Lewiston ME.   She has had solo exhibitions at Nicelle Beauchene Gallery, New York NY, Salon 94, New York NY, New York NY, and White Columns, New York, NY.  Her work has been written about in Cultured Magazine, Artforum, The New Yorker, New York Observer, Modern Painters, The New York Times, Art in America, and more.  

All inquires please contact Adam Miller at adam@the-pit.la