I can’t help asking Deville Cohen (Born in Petach Tikva, Israel, 1977,  Lives and works in New York) a few things about his work and life, just to get the idea of the inner process hidden under his intriguing images.

SB: Something in your work bring my mind back to the movie The Art of Sleep by Michel Gondry, where the the inner world of the main character, a graphic designer from Paris, came out to real life from his drawings book, in animated and real size version.
Your objects, instead, comes from reality and you try to catch them with a photocopier machine.
You used to put every object from 3D  to 2D  without colors (lifeless?) but suddenly they grow up and it really seems that you are giving life to them, like in a big puppets theater, like a huge animated pop-up.
We are in front of many changes: we see dimensional changes from 3D to 2D, scale changes from blows up to decline from reality and fiction. Which are your models and inspirations? Do you write the entire screenplay?

DC: It is funny that you mention Michel Gondry, I love his work. I remember when I first saw his videos they made me think of my favorite video clip from the 80′s, A-HA’s Take On Me. As a Child I was diagnosed with cataract in my left eye and it was operated on. I wore an eye patch for a while which influenced my ideas of 3 dimensional vision, orientation and balance. When I saw the A-HA video I could totally relate to its aesthetic and I always wondered if Michel Gondry was also inspired by it.

My other models and influences are film makers such as David Cronenberg and Alfred Hitchcock, and play writers like Samuel Beckett and Tennessee Williams. Some of the artist that works I admire are Anthony McCall, Robert Wilson, Vladimir Malevich and Guy Bourdin.

Act one of my video Grayscale from 2012, for example, was inspired by the character of Winnie in Samuel Beckett’s Happy Days, especially the relationship she had to her bag and its contents. My video Poison from 2012 was inspired by the use of poison in the Shakespearean tragedies, and the narrative structure of the project I am working on now is based on the cult television show The X-Files.

Yes, I write and develop the entire screenplay. I start by creating a vocabulary of objects, locations and materials that contain the formal and cultural qualities that I am interested to work with for each project. In the process of drawing the storyboards, designing the props, an building models of the sets, I change their proportions, dimensions and materials. In the scenes that I write and direct I use performed context and association in order to explore and reflect on the original meaning of those objects, and on their potential to participate in the logic of my new given context.

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