Ground: New Work by Charles Cohan

Honolulu Museum of Art has selected Charles Cohan as the 14th recipient of the Catharine E.B. Cox Award for Excellence in Visual Arts, and his forthcoming exhibition. 

Ground features new work by Cohan, including large-scale prints and print blocks from his Samish series, the horizontal-line images from his Ground series, as well as a collaborative installation with fellow printmaker Abigail Romanchak. Through the exhibition, Cohan contemplates nature’s evolutionary process, and the way memory can sometimes fix that which is in flux. He concentrates on two experiences: the eruption of Mount St. Helens and the removal of trees that, until 2015, grew on his family’s land in Washington State.

In collaboration with Romanchak, Cohan brings focus to the interpretative process of “sensing” seismological phenomena—a practice that connects the geological histories of Samish Island, Washington, where Cohan is from, and Hawaiʻi nei, where Romanchak is from—and a deep sense of loss after the land of his earlier years suddenly no longer matched his memories of that place.

Credit: Exhibition overview from museum website