Lisa Kokin | Art made from sewn found photos

Welcome

This website strives to be accurate and complete. It represents a large part of the work I have completed since 1990. Although it is rather vast in scope, there are many pieces in each body of work that are not included. On occasion I accept commissions for private and public collections. Please send me a note if you are interested in a commission.

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Sewing & Alterations

Sewn Found Photos

I am 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. I feel somehow that it should be illegal to own them, yet since they are for sale it might as well be me who buys them.

Sometimes there are inscriptions on the back (“Susie, 7 years old”) but more often they come to me stripped of all identity. I sit in my studio and speculate about the nature of the photographed people’s lives. I will, of course, never know the truth, so I feel it is my job to give them new lives and rescue them from the obscurity they would be headed for were it not for me, humble servant of the arts. I try to invent an altogether different identity for them but of course, in the final analysis these works are more about me than any of the hundreds of anonymous individuals who appear in my work.