Curated Cheese Plates

 

Lauren Cohen’s Curated Cheese Plates transform the familiar language of a cheese board into a quiet meditation on loneliness, appetite, and the longing for human connection. Presented in Park Slope in the winter of 2023, the project featured a series of meticulously hand built ceramic cheese plates, hyperreal, humorous, and slightly uncanny, arranged as offerings to no one and everyone.

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Each plate becomes a stand in for emotional hunger, the desire to be seen, to be fed, to share a table with another person. The ceramics mimic abundance while carrying the weight of absence. Their frozen stillness suggests moments of togetherness that never fully materialize, social rituals staged but uninhabited.

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Installed as a street side booth, the work invited passersby into an intimate, liminal space where domestic comfort collided with public vulnerability. By presenting food as both object and metaphor, Cohen asks viewers to consider how we perform nourishment, emotional, physical, communal, especially in a city where connection can be fleeting.

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Rooted in her broader practice of blending humor, autobiography, and domestic rituals, Curated Cheese Plates becomes Cohen’s portrait of contemporary solitude, tender, absurd, and deeply human.