Monday, May 16, 2011
This image based on the copywrighted work of AP photographer Richard Drew.
It took a decade, but Bryna Cohen’s series of works on the 9/11 World Trade Centre disaster has gained some traction in the public domain.
Two of the digital images from her Terror series were purchased recently by the City of Ottawa and are on view currently at the City Hall gallery (one hung on the wall, the other in a promotional video).
The purchased images are based on photographs of figures falling from the burning towers (one taken by AP photographer Richard Drew).
“Over the ten years in which I have been working on this subject, it received very little commercial interest,” admitted Cohen, a Montreal-born artist who teaches at the Ottawa School of Art.
“It really has not been shown anywhere as a body of work. I did apply to exhibit in various venues, however it was refused. One cannot know why, since venues for public exhibition in Ottawa are few and far between.”
It’s hard not to speculate that sensitivity around the subject matter had something to do with the general ambivalence towards the work. There’s no shortage of healthy debate on how quickly artists should use large-scale disasters as creative inspiration.
“My work dramatizes the impact of horror by freezing the figures in a white isolated space,” said Cohen in her artist statement. “Out of context the figures paradoxically affect a buoyancy and grace approaching the sublime. Trapped at window ledges on the uppermost floors, people heroically contemplated the imminent inevitability of their own mortality. The images invoke fear, empathy, desperation, heroism, loss of autonomy and power.”
Cohen has closely followed the tragedy of 9/11 from the outset and remembers walking along the fence of the American Embassy as it became a memorial wall full of expressions of condolence.
“This work was very difficult for me to accomplish,” admitted the artist. “I started by trying to paint and to draw the figures clinging to the windows of the upper floors of the WTC and even that was upsetting. I felt I had witnessed an event, via the actual photos, which were horrific but factual, and that these moments and people could not be forgotten.”
