Lisa Kokin | Mixed Media Sculpture with Recycled Materials

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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Sculpture

In 1996, I was invited to the Buchenwald Memorial on the site of the former concentration camp, to install my piece Remembrance, which was acquired for the permanent collection of the museum, and to participate in the 51st anniversary of the liberation of the camp.

An exhibit at the Memorial which made a strong impression on me was the long, narrow display case with hundreds of buttons, fragments of clothing, dentures, pieces of eyeglasses and other remnants of the incomprehensible suffering which occurred at Buchenwald. These tiny objects conveyed a sense of the vanished lives which the charts, documents and archival photographs could not. When I returned, I began a series of sculptures and installations based on the remnants in the display case.

There But For Fortune, The Prisoners, and Business Table are all part of a larger series in which shredded money played a major role. I like money in its shredded state because it is stripped of value and power. Worthless, it becomes just so much green and white confetti. It is literally not worth the paper it is printed on.

As I separate each strip, the patterns, letters, numbers, and gradations of color are more striking than when the bills are intact. Washington’s heavy-lidded eyes, references to higher powers, cryptic serial numbers, seals and signatures, scrolls and flourishes. When sliced-up and decontextualized, money is really quite mysterious and beautiful. It no longer has the ability to poison relationships, topple governments, create misery and privilege.