JDJ presents the New York debut of a new performance and a solo exhibition by the Los Angeles-based artist Barnett Cohen.

Working across performance, painting, and poetry, Barnett Cohen chronicles the vast array of language and imagery as it moves through our shared consciousness. Cohen's work deals in anxious forces and neurotic tendencies, the apocalyptic and the quotidian, the individual and the collective.

Cohen will premiere MOUTHBRAIN, 2021, his first new performance piece since recent works at Los Angeles institutions REDCAT and JOAN in 2020 and 2019, respectively.

Staged in the round, the two performers engage with the audience directly during this 50 minute long work. Written and directed by Cohen, the text and choreography mirror our post-narrative world, in which a constant flurry of chaotic information attenuates our already-thin attention spans. For MOUTHBRAIN, Cohen will collaborate withchoreographer Lisa Fagan and performers Evan Spigelman and Deja Bowen with looks by LA-based fashion designer Nancy Stella Soto.

The exhibition focuses on Cohen’s recent body of paintings comprised entirely out of found and collected stickers on canvas. Each work acts as a constellation of contemporary mark making and chronicles the vast array of language, imagery, and sentiment as it moves with velocity through public space.

Each sticker is die-cut, dipped in acrylic liquid polymer, and thoughtfully situated on the canvas with painterly considerations of color, composition, and depth in mind. The kaleidoscopic works are then sealed with several layers of UV polycote, which creates a seamless surface that unites the cacophony of symbols.

Entitled by the dates of their completion, the paintings become archival documents that represent the dynamic ecology of symbols we employ to claim physical territory and assert the identities that we wish to project outward.

Barnett Cohen is a queer artist who shapeshifts between poet, performance maker, painter, and activist. Born in South Africa, Cohen grew up in Georgia, and now lives in Los Angeles. He has exhibited, staged performances, and held readings at REDCAT, JOAN, LAXART, Pieter Space, 356 Mission, Human Resources, The Box (Los Angeles), ICP and JDJ (New York), City Limits (Oakland), and The Onassis Foundation (Greece.) In 2021, Open Space/SFMOMA published a collection of his poems alongside those of artist Simone Forti. He has been in-residence at SVA, Skowhegan, MacDowell, and NARS and was recently nominated for the Rema Hort Mann Foundation Emerging Artist Grant. In 2017, Cohen founded the Mutual Aid Immigration Network (MAIN), a trilingual free assistance hotline for people detained in immigration detention centers across the US. MAIN connects those who call with bond funds and legal services that accelerate their freedom from incarceration.