Yve Laris Cohen: Meeting Ground

Entering the single, windowless room in which Yve Laris Cohen’s Meeting Ground is installed, one can’t help but think, “Is this it?”—and then suddenly feel guilty about perpetuating a clichéd philistine conception of art. The work is quiet, unassuming and sparse: it consists of the transplanted walls of the interior of Sherwood Auditorium, a grand performance space in La Jolla, California that was shuttered in 2017 to make way for the construction of a new facility. The old auditorium’s walls line the walls of the gallery space completely, fitting perfectly from floor to ceiling, inch for inch. 1 There is nothing else there.

The sparseness could