Jennifer Coates: September 2008

In her current work, Jennifer Coates — a shy, comatose woodland creature who re-percolates her own nervous activity with fluorescent paints — deploys nocturnal unicorn boners in hyper-animated sexual frenzy as anchors for expanses of atmospheric radiance to construe a perfect storm of "a-ha!" moments. Coates retro-fits the unicorn's embattled sexuality to exist external to the world: impoverished ethnic communities are instantly turned into war zones once normative gendered binarisms are undone by aggressively concocted rococo surfaces erupting from a field of aqueous blackness. Influenced by her dead grandmother's dread of humanity, Coates seems to grin, toothless and catnapping, at the festering miasma of shrieking middle-aged dirtbags fully invested in their own muscular dystopia of crunking halitosis. Coates' indeterminate woodsy abysses create tension between Elton John and Celine Dion, and eclipse even the brute, unmediated experience of observing Pamela Anderson performing with the band Comus without her makeup. And while the shock of seeing one of Coates' huge moons coming at you with a mouth open to bite is not a pleasant or normal experience (and for many thi
s kind of "art" is the Antichrist), the underlying philosophy is as lucent as the silence of God Itself, implying all the unapologetic lathered linearity of tripe pierogis glowing praeternaturally in the midnight neon of a flyspeck diner on the magical edge of reality.
Sharon Mesmer