THE LIU SHIMING ARTIST PERRI COHL: It its itself

Perri Cohl

It its itself

On View: September 29 - October 19, 2023

Gallery Hours: Tue-Fri, 11 am-5 pm

Opening Reception: September 28, 6-8 pm

About Exhibition

The Liu Shiming Art Foundation is honored to have Perri Cohl among the inaugural recipients of the Liu Shiming Art Grant. This grant, awarded for the first time in 2023, recognizes artists in their early careers. Cohl’s work complicates the legibility of queer and trans bodies through strategies of obstruction, distraction, and divergent visual logic. The pieces on view in this show invite observers to question the relationship between what is seen and what is envisioned.

In a series of portraits made within the subjects' intimate domestic settings, Cohl focuses on the  peripheries of the body—hints of a throat, curves of a foot, and the top of a head. The visuals resist a  heteronormative gaze that dissects and scrutinizes bodies in order to extrapolate gendered  expectations, while deliberately mimicking it. Given the ambiguous and fragmented nature of these  photos, they relieve the viewer of the need to categorize the individual bodies depicted, giving way  to subjects that transcend taxonomies.

The interplay between artist and subject is captured in the form of two video installations. In these  pieces, Cohl takes a divergent stance from obscuration, choosing to portray subjects in their entirety. And yet the projections are overexposed to the edge of legibility, thereby both sidestepping and  mirroring the burning gaze of a gender-essentialist society. Complementing this, the gallery lighting serves an inverse purpose, concealing rather than illuminating the projected bodies.

Navigating the intricate dynamics of objectification, It its itself challenges a conventional way of  viewing that might easily render queer bodies as vulnerable while broadening the ways we perceive  their evolving and interconnected narrative.

About the Artist

Perri Cohl (b. 1992) is a non-binary artist from New York City. They received their masters from  Rutgers University Mason Gross School of the Arts in 2022. Their work has been shown at Aperture  Gallery, Westbeth Gallery, All Street, Bushel Collective, Spring/Break and featured in the New York  Times. In addition to their practice, they teach photography at Rutgers University and the International Center of Photography and curate exhibitions by contemporary artists.

About Liu Shiming Art Grant

The Liu Shiming Art Grant is a charitable fund that aims to encourage artists who are dedicated to the lifetime pursuit of developing their art and contributing to society. Our highest priority is to support artists early in their careers who create work or projects that have the potential to blossom and grow, while we encourage them to reflect on how humanity and multiculturalism are represented in their work.

The exhibition is sponsored and supported by the Liu Shiming Art Foundation