SU SAN COHN___ JEWELLER AND ARTIST
Su san Cohn is a jeweller and artist who utilises technology to modernise her craft. Her work explores the value and typology of jewellery, drawing from a range of influences including electronic and digital media, medical media, street and youth culture, and futuristic visions of cyberspace.
Su san Cohn’s exhibition, Pieces of Peace, interrogates the broad potential of adornment as a peace-tool while examining the impact of industrial production on handmaking in the age of automation.
A central point of distinction is Cohn’s choice to work with machines rather than artificial intelligence. Cohn notes that machines are artificial assistants, lacking agency and freedom, thereby perfect for repetitive tasks. Machines have the capacity for forever fabrication, allowing them to continue making long after the artist has gone home, or even passed away. For Cohn, this presents an opportunity to explore the tension between the democratic and the elite as contextualised by the artist’s studio practice. The robots will do the work most of the time, but they will not challenge the artist. For Su san Cohn, machines are a tool used to explore ideas, not collaborators.
In Pieces of Peace production seeks to subvert the idea of machines being used to create components for warfare by using them, instead, to produce peace offerings in the form of tokens and wearable craft. Throughout Cohn’s practice, she has explored the language of jewellery as a antidote to society’s anxiety about the stranger, the other and the interpersonally fractured.
The inherent potential of jewellery as a peace-tool is a central theme throughout the exhibition. Cohn posits that these adornments can serve as a means of communication and solidarity between people during difficult times. Together, the artworks explore the role these pieces play in creating a sense of connection and understanding between people as something which must be activated by personhood and humanness.
In its totality Pieces of Peace explores the potential of jewellery as a peace-tool, while examining the impact of industrial production on traditional hand-making techniques. Using robotic assistance in the production of these pieces, Cohn creates objects that are beside the point, objects that are accessories to the performance or action of peacemaking itself.
The viewer is invited to world-build and ultimately, usher into existence, a narrative of machines which, rather than being employed for destruction, exemplify togetherness, reconciliation, and peace.
Su san Cohn has exhibited extensively globally, and the work is held in major public and private collections such as the Victoria & Albert Museum, London, England; The Shanghai Museum, China; Musée des Arts Décoratifs, Paris, France; The National Gallery of Australia, Canberra; and the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne.
Pieces of Peace is now showing until 24 June 2023 at Gallery 02, Anna Schwartz Gallery, Flinders Lane Melbourne Australia.
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Words and images courtesy of the artist and Anna Schwartz Gallery.
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