Jeff Cowen: Asemia

7 Nov 2024-31 Jan 2025

Overview

CASSIUS&Co. presents Jeff Cowen - Asemia, the New York-born artist’s first solo presentation in the UK. Opening on 7th November 2024, Asemia follows the exhibition Provence Works, jointly presented earlier this year at the Huis Marseille Museum of Photography and the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam.

A photograph can be a useful document, a means of translating the real world into a comprehensible image, but not in the work of Jeff Cowen. Instead he uses photography to seek, in himself and in the viewer, a certain kind of asemia - the condition of being unable to express or comprehend signs and symbols. Using processes that are complex, secretive and alchemical he manipulates the camera’s work, abstracting the image and obscuring its origin. In this way the artist opens up expansive new territories for the photographic medium.

It is a significant approach, not least because in the relatively short history of photography, few artists have attempted to broaden its material frontiers. There is no photographic equivalent of the term ‘painterly’. It is also a priestly one: by putting the viewer in a state of asemia, the artist offers something spiritual, an experience that is both prelapsarian and close to a certain idea of the world after this one, where all specificities and content, all signs and symbols, have disappeared.

Jeff Cowen - Asemia will be presented alongside a concurrent book exhibition of rare Surrealist works.

Jeff Cowen (b. 1966, New York) has a scholarly background in East Asian studies. His first photographic series West 14th Street, which documented the lives of the transgender sex workers who lived in his neighbourhood, was acquired by the New York Historical Society. He then worked as a studio assistant to Larry Clark, and in the 1990s studied academic drawing and painting at the Art Students League and New York Studio School. His works have been the subject of solo exhibitions at Kunsthalle Bremerhaven, Germany, Huis Marseille, Amsterdam, Ludwig Museum, Koblenz, Museum of Modern Art, Tbilisi and the Moscow Museum of Modern Art, Moscow. In 2021 he was awarded the Pollock-Krasner Grant for Fine Art Still Photography, and in 2024 presented his latest project, Provence Works, simultaneously at the Huis Marseille Museum of Photography and the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam.