The Disrupted Landscape – Laura Corallo-Titus & Helen S. Cohen

First Tuesday ArtWalk: 
* April 2, 5:30 pm – 7:30 pm

Exhibition Dates:
* April 2024

Ruby Living presents The Disrupted Landscape featuring oils on canvas by Laura Corallo-Titus and Helen S. Cohen

Laura Corallo-Titus

These paintings address changing perceptions toward landscape, the environment and our place in the world.

Initially I was struck by the sense of permanence, vastness and grandeur of traditional landscape painting. In contrast, our contemporary vision is usually momentary; ( a view from a car, plane, train or film), fragmentary or distracted.

Traditional depictions of the land and sea display a sense of power, stability, strength… a place to be conquered or conquer. Our dialogue around the environment now is of fragility and impermanence, destruction and loss.

Our views of the passing world are frequently distorted from the glare of a window, a flash of artificial light, the editing of a photograph, political divisiveness.

It is in this procession that nature becomes metaphor for mind. The paintings begin to reflect less on a physical place than as nature as a conduit to an increasingly disordered and disorienting world view.

Place and perspective continue to disassociate from a given Image.

Natural colors lie uncomfortably next to neon. My intent is to mirror the discord in these realities within the structure and history of painting.

Helen S. Cohen

My studio is a refuge where I delight in the immediacy and messy, visceral process of making mixed media paintings.

Each composition takes shape through a kind of “call and response” process – a dynamic, intimate conversation between the canvas and the materials I work into it: thin and saturated layers of paint; drips and washes; scribbles and scratches; collage fragments from discarded paintings as well as written words and graphic elements taken from journals, sketchbooks and the detritus of daily life.

In my paintings I explore the idea of “sense of place” and all its myriad layers of meaning. What has evolved is a kind of mapping of my life experience that has both geographic and psychological dimensions to it, where internal and external meld.

Forms take shape that hold emotional meaning for me — horizons, openings and portals, bridges and border crossings; nests, bowls and vessels.

My work as a painter has evolved alongside two other central aspects of my life: my work as a documentary filmmaker and my experience as the mother of a child (now a grown woman) with a developmental disability.

As a filmmaker, I’ve explored different approaches to visual story telling that have influenced my more abstract work as a painter.

As a mom, I’ve been immersed in the world of non-verbal learning and communication, fascinated by the mysterious process of language acquisition and the ways in which language informs intelligence, perception, and meaning.

This experience has been a driving force in my development as an abstract painter.

In recent years I have been developing a body of work (Beyond Measure) using collage materials drawn from years of accumulated educational and aptitude tests, work sheets, homework, and my daughter’s marks and artwork.

Working with these materials as collage elements is a cathartic process through which I reclaim, deface and repurpose the ripped and torn fragments into new constellations, giving them their own unique artistic presence while adding another layer of personal content to the work.

In addition to the many varied artists whose work I have studied and been inspired by, I was greatly influenced by the late Leigh Hyams, my mentor, teacher and friend for over twenty years.

Leigh’s greatest gift to me was nurturing an insatiable joy and curiosity about art, and cultivating an ability to see the art in everything – shapes in the negative space between tree limbs and the beautiful lines in sidewalk cracks; the variety and vibrancy of colors in dirt and vegetables; the temperature of light.

I’m guided by this enhanced perception and “visual language” in my studio practice.