LISA KOKIN

1963
Sewn found photograph sculpture, 6-1/4 x 5-1/4 x 5-1/4, 2000

LISA KOKIN is intrigued with other people’s photographic recording of their lives both for the generic quality they possess -- the family and social rituals, studio portraits, vacation shots -- and for the feeling of sadness and nostalgia that acquiring other people’s memories provokes in me. She feels somehow that it should be illegal to own them, yet since they are for sale it might as well be her who buys them.

Sometimes there are inscriptions on the back (“Susie, 7 years old”) but more often they come to her stripped of all identity. Kokin speculates about the nature of the photographed people’s lives, and will, of course, never know the truth, so gives them new lives and rescue them from the obscurity they would be headed for. She tries to invent an altogether different identity for them but of course, in the final analysis these works are more about the artist than any of the hundreds of anonymous individuals who appear in the work.