(b. 1944 Racine, Wisconsin – 2014 Montreal, Quebec) Lynne Cohen is known for her photographs of domestic and institutional interior spaces, which have included men’s clubs, living rooms, beauty salons, retirement homes and banquet halls, laboratories, lobbies, classrooms, offices, showrooms, shooting ranges, factories, spas, and military installations. A recipient of numerous awards of merit, including the Governor General’s Award in Visual Arts and Media Arts (Canada) in 2005 and the inaugural Scotiabank Photography Award in 2011, her work received much critical acclaim for her highly innovative and rigorous process. Trained as a sculptor and printmaker, when Pop Art and Minimalism were dominant in the art world, Cohen focused from the start on the way things appear and function in our lives. She had a long-standing interest in the artificial and the everyday and aimed to exhibit the strangeness and contradictions of everyday world. Her work is especially striking because of the mysterious nature of the places she photographs, in many cases places with odd symmetries, repetitions and absurd disjunctions of scale. This results in images that look like theatre sets or constructions, even like artists’ installations. “I feel”, she once observed, “that the world can’t be like it is. It seems full of finished works of art”.