Sarah Cohen: Castle Rock

Based originally on images taken in New York City public spaces and her hometown Massachusetts coastline, Sarah Cohen employs a photographer’s lens to memorialize sentimental engagements with everyday life. Cohen’s subtle abstract inflections to these scenes from ordinary experience rely on patient, semi-transparent layering of highly considered color-combinations, often transforming quiet, bucolic imagery into austere sites of introspection. Cohen captures moments without intervening, creating settings that are paradoxically limitless in their implication and simultaneously relatable. Often precious or potentially morose, it’s never quite clear the intention of Cohen’s visual symbology, but the thoughtful, painterly interpretations to the original photograph elevates the magnitude of each scenario, allowing viewers to ponder the potential outcomes of these transient, but decidedly personal interactions. 

The title of the show, Castle Rock, similarly reflects this fictionalization—the tendency to assign stalwart or romantic traits to foreign, unknown, or in this case, inanimate entities. Ultimately, viewers will decide their own response to Cohen’s unspoken narratives, an ambiguous effort that only adds to their inexplicable luminosity and emotional impact. 

While an adept technical application distinguishes Cohen’s work from their familiar settings, the paintings are as much found as they are built, emphasizing the limitations of artistic authenticity, but also centralizing the act of noticing otherwise discarded or overlooked features of contemporaneity as an essential component of Cohen’s practice—an interest that places her work in dialogue with artists and thinkers that frame domestic life as the battleground of artistic innovation within systems of societal constraint. Immediately timeless and comforting, longer consideration of Cohen’s minor transformations to places of apparent contentment might imply a more nuanced representation of American life. It’s tempting to look upon these compositions with momentary satisfaction—the seaside towns synonymous with weekend getaways, long walks and winter picnics, the elongated moments of private reflection within sublime landscapes. Yet while Cohen’s paintings resonate through a sense of coloristic strategy and a nostalgic sensibility, ultimately her project asks viewers to appreciate features of daily life that might otherwise be overlooked—a pursuit that necessitates a departure from our typical path home. 

Sarah Cohen is a painter originally from Marblehead, Massachusetts. She received her BFA from Boston University and her MFA at Hunter College in 2023. She recently featured new paintings in Hyacinth’s 2024 summer group show titled Metropolis and Kaleidoscope Gallery’s group exhibition Autobahn. This is her first solo exhibition at Hyacinth.