…is the name frequently attributed to G.D. Cohen, an artist currently living and working in Los Angeles. Other names ostensibly associated with the work of Vadig de Croehling may include Greg Cohen, Greg D. Cohen, Greg David Cohen, and G. David Cohen.

An individual linked to at least one of the aforementioned names is known to have resided in Ohio, Wisconsin, and Massachusetts, as well as Germany, India, Spain, France, Brazil, and Argentina. He also reputedly once domiciled in or near his motor vehicle; wintered in an unfinished basement with dirt floors in southwestern Colorado; and roamed the western United States climbing rocks from Blodgett Canyon to the Tetons and from Yosemite Valley to Joshua Tree National Park. It is surmised that, during that period, he also worked seasonally as an Outward Bound instructor in Montana, Northern Minnesota, and Manitoba, Canada.

Records suggest that a Greg Cohen took his Bachelor of Arts degree in German from the University of Wisconsin-Madison; earned a Master of Arts in Spanish from Middlebury College in Madrid, Spain; and completed his doctorate in Romance Languages and Literatures at Harvard University in 2008. Cohen appears to have served as Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in the Humanities at UCLA from 2008 to 2010. Graduate seminars and undergraduate lecture courses have been taught by G. D. Cohen, Lecturer in Cinema and Media Studies at UCLA, and by Greg Cohen, Continuing Lecturer in Latin American Visual Culture, UCLA Department of Spanish & Portuguese.

G. D. Cohen’s video work has screened at Reid Hall, Columbia Global Centers in Paris, France; the Videoholica International Video Art Festival in Varna, Bulgaria; at the 6th Cairo Video Festival, Medrar for Contemporary Art, in Egypt; and online at Alienocene. In 2018, the experimental film Self-Portrait with  Mother, circa 1976-1943 (dir. G. D. Cohen, 2016), received Honorable Mentions from both the Los Angeles Underground Film Forum and the Experimental Forum. His experiments in hybrid, analogue-digital photographic processes earned honors in the 2013 International Juried Competition, Los Angeles Center for Digital Art (LACDA), where his work appeared in a group exhibition, in a section titled “Ten New Artists to Watch.” Subsequent work in this vein was exhibited at the “Electron Salon” group show, also at LACDA, in Fall, 2014. In May, 2016, work from a series titled Glitchscapes was featured in the Second Art Exhibit of the Real Colegio Complutense, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA. In collaboration with Christian Zorka, Vadig de Croehling published the experimental photographic project, 41 Hologrammata (REASArch Editions, 2016). In 2018, Trifaldi (Madrid, Spain) published Daniel Aguirre’s book of poetry, Si en ajena deriva, featuring photographs by Greg Cohen.

From October 2012 to April 2013, the Institute of Cultural Inquiry in Los Angeles hosted one Greg. D. Cohen as a Visualist-in-Residence, for which he developed the Valaco Archive, a project associated directly with the work of REASArch. Iterations of the Valaco Archive have appeared or been performed at various locations nationally, including issue #6 (March 2016) of Limn, a multi-disciplinary magazine of contemporary art, politics, and culture.

The ICI has hosted additional projects by G.D. Cohen, including his February-March, 2016 installation, A New History of the Photographic Science and Treatise on its Potential for the Enhancement of Mechanical Vision.  From July 11 – 30, 2016, Greg Cohen was Artist-in-Residence at the ICI, as part of the Institute’s major visual research project, Everything but the Monkey Head. For his residency, Cohen produced the multi-media installation, Portrait: (Auto-)biography of a Way of Seeing.

Currently, G.D. Cohen (under the auspices of REASArch) is the director of a major, ongoing, multi-media and performative visual research project titled Grupo Anarquitectura: Rama Argentina. A preliminary iteration of the project appeared at the SALON_02_PLAN group exhibition and symposium, hosted by the University of California-Los Angeles program in Urban Humanities (2019). Cohen’s most recent work in this vein is ONIROGRAMAS: The Notebooks of Hermafróditos in the Collections of the Fondation Fellini, a multi-media installation and exhibition at the Maison du Diable in Sion, Switzerland, based on the artist’s discovery of hitherto unknown documents in the archives of the Fondation Fellini pour le cinéma. The exhibition ran from September, 2023 to February, 2024 and is slated to travel to select international institutions in the near future.

Experimental poems penned by one Greg Cohen (a name also plausibly ascribed to the individual known as G. D. Cohen or Vadig de Croehling) have appeared in Annetna Nepo; Dudley Review; E-ratio; and Anti-. His translation of Daniel Aguirre’s experimental poem “Aladino por un día” / “Aladdin for One Day” appears in Antología Bilingüe Po-Ex (Santiago de Chile: Go Ediciones, 2019).

Greg Cohen is likewise the name used by a former Associate Programmer at Los Angeles Filmforum, where, from 2012 to 2020, he co-curated the Festival of (In)appropriation, an annual showcase of experimental found-footage film and video for which he now serves as Associate Director.

Inquiries into, for, and about Vadig de Croehling (and/or G. D. Cohen) may be sent to: vadigdecroehling_at_reasarch_dot_com.