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Blind
Blind is Evan M. Cohen's meditation on corporeality and creation, recollections recounted and reformed. "Take your form / and erase the details / to see the memory."
28 pages, Unknown Binding
Published July 1, 2019
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May 11, 2020
In Blind, Evan M. Cohen guides us through a meditation on the mutability of forms and the endless cycle of self-creation and re-creation. Resembling a chapbook of Zen poems, the book rewards countless readings, like the best poetry collections; the message and the delivery never grow stale.
Although Cohen only uses a handful of colors and relatively simple shapes and designs, the images seem to move effortlessly across the page, transforming a woman into a landscape, a landscape into a piece of a paper, a piece of paper into a bird into a sun into a scroll into a woman again. Cohen uses the language of comics to come nearly as close as possible to animation, breathing life into each page. Many pages consist of 12- or 16-panel layouts that start with one image, and through careful, subtle changes from one panel to the next, end with another image. These visual gymnastics are always delightful to watch unfold.
In one of my favorite sections, a two-page spread, the woman takes a stone and builds an image of her own head around herself until she is fully inside this barrier she has created. Then the stone starts to chip away bit by bit, until a sun, looking like a perfect egg yolk, is revealed. The statue she built around herself was really only a cocoon so that she could morph into something new. She changes again and again, and through this samsaric process, she becomes the world and the world becomes her, connected to everything.
The woman not only moves from one shape to another but from formlessness to substance and back again. All these past selves fade into blurred colors, stored away in boxes that, when opened, blend back together into recognizable forms, another self along the path to re-creation, gratefully acknowledged.
4.5
Although Cohen only uses a handful of colors and relatively simple shapes and designs, the images seem to move effortlessly across the page, transforming a woman into a landscape, a landscape into a piece of a paper, a piece of paper into a bird into a sun into a scroll into a woman again. Cohen uses the language of comics to come nearly as close as possible to animation, breathing life into each page. Many pages consist of 12- or 16-panel layouts that start with one image, and through careful, subtle changes from one panel to the next, end with another image. These visual gymnastics are always delightful to watch unfold.
In one of my favorite sections, a two-page spread, the woman takes a stone and builds an image of her own head around herself until she is fully inside this barrier she has created. Then the stone starts to chip away bit by bit, until a sun, looking like a perfect egg yolk, is revealed. The statue she built around herself was really only a cocoon so that she could morph into something new. She changes again and again, and through this samsaric process, she becomes the world and the world becomes her, connected to everything.
The woman not only moves from one shape to another but from formlessness to substance and back again. All these past selves fade into blurred colors, stored away in boxes that, when opened, blend back together into recognizable forms, another self along the path to re-creation, gratefully acknowledged.
4.5
Displaying 1 of 1 review