BIO / STATEMENT
BIO
Joie Rey Cohen earned an MFA in Creative Inquiry & Interdisciplinary Art, with a focus on Visual Memoir from the California Institute of Integral Studies, and a BA in Gender Studies, with a focus on Multimedia Art from New College of California in San Francisco. Joie has shown work on three continents, and in over ten cities worldwide. Joie works one on one with local business owners and artists in the Denver Metro Area and in the San Francisco Bay Area, teaching them how to design and maintain their own websites, and photographs all the fabulous people.
STATEMENT
Joie's fine art is empowerment of a queer, Jewish, working-class experience, where industrial meets nature, gender lines are blurred, and surreal is revealed. It is an awakening into the place where subconscious and conscious collide, within a journey of overlapping textures, colors, and symbols. The many layers of identity; including but not limited to gender, spirituality, oppression, privilege, ethnicity, traditions, dis/ability, are figuratively and literally represented on the two dimensional photographic plane, and always through high contrast techniques, disguises, digital collage, and masks, which create surreal and often genderless imagery. This photographic process is a dimensional building collaboration between subject and photographer. This work is demonstrative of the infinite energetic connections between photographer and subject, and the goal is to bring forth the individuality from those people and places being photographed. It is an elaboration of the impossibility of creating work that completely excludes the personal experiences and personality traits of the artist and subject alike. Those being photographed become the self portrait.
Joie Rey Cohen earned an MFA in Creative Inquiry & Interdisciplinary Art, with a focus on Visual Memoir from the California Institute of Integral Studies, and a BA in Gender Studies, with a focus on Multimedia Art from New College of California in San Francisco. Joie has shown work on three continents, and in over ten cities worldwide. Joie works one on one with local business owners and artists in the Denver Metro Area and in the San Francisco Bay Area, teaching them how to design and maintain their own websites, and photographs all the fabulous people.
STATEMENT
Joie's fine art is empowerment of a queer, Jewish, working-class experience, where industrial meets nature, gender lines are blurred, and surreal is revealed. It is an awakening into the place where subconscious and conscious collide, within a journey of overlapping textures, colors, and symbols. The many layers of identity; including but not limited to gender, spirituality, oppression, privilege, ethnicity, traditions, dis/ability, are figuratively and literally represented on the two dimensional photographic plane, and always through high contrast techniques, disguises, digital collage, and masks, which create surreal and often genderless imagery. This photographic process is a dimensional building collaboration between subject and photographer. This work is demonstrative of the infinite energetic connections between photographer and subject, and the goal is to bring forth the individuality from those people and places being photographed. It is an elaboration of the impossibility of creating work that completely excludes the personal experiences and personality traits of the artist and subject alike. Those being photographed become the self portrait.
