Nina Cochran

"One need never leave the confines of New York to get all the greenery one wishes—I can’t even enjoy a blade of grass unless I know there’s a subway handy, a record store or some other sign that people do not totally regret life."

– Frank O’Hara, Meditations in an Emergency, 1957

The experience of New York in layers:

The first set of photographs makes use of images which, in their respective eras, were intended to inspire awe — early Renaissance altarpieces and stained glass from the Met, the present-day Manhattan skyline — and embeds them into familiar textures from the sidewalks of New York City. The photos, referred to as Tattoos, set up a soft collision between deep past and the present.

The Roosevelt Island images are intentionally misleading. They consider a place transformed into a memory, where a concrete site becomes a formal abstraction concerned with memory, material, and the process of translation.

The Oculus series is rooted in the vast commercial space that now occupies the former WTC site. Cochran presents a quiet revisiting of Sept. 11, where the personal confronts the global, where private life finds space inside a kinetic public arena.

Public and private, past and present, layering, melding, and dodging — these ideas nudge each other within the frames of Nina Cochran’s debut solo exhibition.

Nina Cochran (www.ninacochran.com) is based in New York.  Her images have appeared in the Hartford Courant, The Berkshire Eagle, and The Boston Globe, as well as the NY Daily News where she is currently a freelance photographer. She has previously worked in museums, in publishing, and was literary assistant to novelist John Irving for two years in rural Vermont. She earned a degree in Art History from Williams College.