Articles from July 2024

Each week, Petah Coyne reads two or three books. Along with film and the natural world, literature has had a profound impact on the artist throughout her decades-long career, as she references Flannery O’Connor, Zora Neale Hurston, Zelda Fitzgerald, and numerous other women in her works. Coyne gravitates toward texts rooted in feminist principles, which she then puts into conversation and filters through large-scale sculptures and installations.

Dichotomies flourish in the artist’s practice as she suspends silk bouquets in specially formulated wax, dipping the vibrant blooms in a molten wash and often displaying them upside down. Many pieces capture the tension between preservation and loss and beauty and monstrosity, particularly as they relate to the complexity of women’s lives. The combination of myriad materials furthers this contrast, as the artist pairs luscious silks with paper towels, soft velvet with nuts and bolts, and shackles with woven tassels.

Installations like “Untitled #1103 (Daphne)” and the later “Untitled #1181 (Dante’s Daphne)” wind spindly branches, flowers, and artificial taxidermy around an undulating chicken wire armature. Sprayed with black paint, the dark, ominous works appear alive, as if crawling across the gallery to catch prey. The titles reference the Greek myth and the nymph who was turned into a laurel tree after attempting to escape Apollo’s unrequited love.

Similarly dynamic works include “Untitled #1379 (The Doctor’s Wife),” which features hand-sewn Venetian velvet in sumptuous mounds of navy and black. The work shares a name with a 1966 novel by Sawako Ariyoshi, which fictionalizes the real story of a Japanese surgeon pitted between his wife and mother. As two statutory figures rise from the roiling mass, the artist stitches together a tapestry of conflict, forcing the pair to face off while the third player in the dispute remains unseen.

Championing women has always been an integral part of Coyne’s practice and life. In addition to her sculptural works, the artist is a longtime collaborator with the anonymous feminist collective Guerilla Girls. She and photographer Kathy Grove are behind a series of documentary portraits of each original member, creating an art historical record of the activist group.

Coyne will open a large solo show titled How Much a Heart Can Hold at the Chazen Museum of Art in Madison this September, which will travel to the Neuberger Museum of Art in Purchase, New York, and Lowe Art Museum in Miami in the following years. Her works will also be included in several group exhibitions this fall, including at Grounds for Sculpture, Frost Art Museum, and Lehman College. Until then, explore Coyne’s vast oeuvre on her website and Instagram.

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From bronze, chrome, and silicone, Marc Quinn’s larger-than-life botanicals emerge with delicate precision. The exhibition Light into Life at Royal Botanic Gardens Kew in London continues the artist’s exploration of the boundaries between the natural and artificial, the living and non-living, sexuality, and the passage of time.

Quinn often uses a mirrored effect to literally reflect humanity in nature while blurring the lines between the work and its surroundings. In others, he emphasizes the heft, history, and scale possible with bronze. For example, “Held by Desire (The Dimensions of Freedom)” and “Burning Desire” tap into the metaphorical association of flowers to human biology and anatomy, their titles emphasizing emotional parallels, like the precise tension of a carefully tended bonsai or the supple petals of a red, sensual orchid with yearning.

Orchids, bonsai, and tropical flowers provide the starting point for Quinn’s remarkable sculptures that emphasize permanence and in a realm that relies on the opposite: changing seasons, weather patterns, and visiting pollinators. He confronts the ephemerality of blossoms and leaves by casting their likenesses at a monumental scale in metal, freezing blooms to preserve the zenith of their beauty, or immersing entire bouquets in silicone oil to indefinitely sustain their vibrancy.

Light into Life continues through September 29. Explore more of the artist’s work on his website.

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Yoshiyuki Katayama captures the ineffable qualities of nature and time in her ongoing series Umwelt (previously), which traces myriad relationships between insects and flowering plants.

The title takes its name from an ethological concept that uses the German word “umwelt,” usually translated to “self-centered world,” to describe how animals experience their surroundings. Through elegant timelapses of unfurling blossoms, Katayama composes portraits of hostas and gerberas inhabited by colorful six-and eight-legged creatures that, thanks to some great editing, move in real time.

Find more on the artist’s website and Instagram.

Do stories and artists like this matter to you? Become a Colossal Member today and support independent arts publishing for as little as $7 per month. The article Insects Inhabit Blooming Floral Worlds in ‘Umwelt’ by Yoshiyuki Katayama appeared first on Colossal.