#chart gallery

Taking place at both High Noon Gallery and Chart Gallery is Jennifer Coates’s exhibition Edge Effects. The paintings are dense with imagery that requires the viewer to take a longer look.

From the press release-

Edge Effects is an ecological term that refers to the sometimes problematic changes in biodiversity where different habitats converge. These transitional zones are called ecotones: animal/vegetable environments in flux, like ditches, forest edges, marshes and grasslands. The ecotone provides a metaphorical through line for Coates’s current paintings, in which micro-climates of imagery collide. Zones of color, marks, and depicted elements aggregate and are collaged together, creating a hybrid sense of place.

Coates uses acrylic and spray paint—synthetic chemicals—to represent the landscape, emphasizing the toxicity that now runs through most organisms. Despite this pervasive chemical presence, her paintings present an ecofeminist belief in the possibility of restoring the self through hyper connection with nature.

At the edges of shapes, halos and heightened optical effects take the viewer in and out of spatial logic. She repeatedly depicts plants that flourish in poor soil, found at edges between cultivation and wildness. These ditch weeds are ubiquitous in rural Pennsylvania where Coates works in the summer. Painting them has become a way to reconcile with invasive plant species. She anchors archetypes such as Diana, Pan, Dionysus, and the Maenads to the woodlands where she has spent much of her life, incorporating local wildlife like common birds and butterflies. The butterflies, for example, pollinate as well as “puddle”—a behavior that extracts minerals from mud, carrion, blood, and sometimes tears, signaling the edge between vitality and rot. In Coates’s paintings they also feed on the remains of Classical sculpture.

Portals appear as entrances to bunkers, caves, ruins, and passage tombs. Rocks are a new pictorial element for Coates that provide a further engagement with the materiality of paint. Structures and imagery are built up and broken down through her painterly process and go in and out of presence, at the edge of sense.

I shall be showing at GLUE - Chart Gallery, Chelsea 13 Feb - Sun 9 March 2014

The CHART GALLERY PRESENTS

Michal Cole, Cordelia Donohoe, David Ferry, Mark Harris, KEELERTORN…