“What was any art but a mould in which to imprison for a moment the shining elusive element which is life itself – life hurrying past us and running away, too strong to stop, too sweet to lose.” Willa Cather

Cohan and Leslie is pleased to announce a summer exhibition presenting new works by three artists: Juergen Drescher, Melanie Schiff, and Mark Soo.

Juergen Drescher (b. 1955, lives and works in Berlin) has been exhibiting sculptures, videos and drawings since the early 1980s. His first major work was a bar installation exhibited in the 1981 student show at the Dusseldorf Kunstakademie, and subsequently in other venues in collaboration with Reinhard Mucha. Drescher’s recent works include an ongoing series of aluminum casts of mundane, daily objects – cardboard boxes, ladders, and a piece of carpeting. The casting process destroys the flimsy originals, leaving a more permanent ghost in its place. This will be Drescher’s New York debut. His work has been seen most recently in solo exhibitions at Mai 36 Galerie in Zurich, and Galleria Suzy Shammah in Milan.

Melanie Schiff (b. 1977, lives and works in Chicago) makes photographs that seemingly inhabit the familiar tropes of still lives, portraits and self-portraits. They are unified by Schiff’s overarching interest in the representation of light, which permeates each work for a very particular emotional resonance. Schiff achieves a subtle balance between the spontaneous preservation of elusive moments, and the documentation of staged scenes with implied narratives. Schiff was recently included in the Whitney Museum’s 2008 Biennial Exhibition.

Mark Soo (b. 1977, lives and works in Vancouver) is a conceptually based artist working in photography, sculpture and installation. Each work is an exploration and critique of specific moments and movements in cultural and social history. Most recently Soo exhibited a large 3-D photographic diptych of Elvis’ recording studio from the 1950s. The photographs were actually made of a re-creation of the studio Soo built, following documentary photographs. This work was shown as part of the Exponential Future exhibition at The Belkin Art Gallery in Vancouver.