Tag: Edge Effects

Solo Shows

Jennifer Coates: Edgy indeed

Contributed by Jonathan Stevenson / Several notable painters – Julie Heffernan, Jules de Balincourt, and Alexis Rockman, among them – have seized on the perils of climate change. In Jennifer Coates’s new solo show “Edge Effects,” jointly mounted at Chart Gallery and High Noon Gallery, she drills deeply into the subject and emerges with work that dazzles to engage, and vice-versa. The show’s title is an ecological term for what happens when one habitat impinges on another, which climate change is accelerating and amplifying. The phenomenon implies crowding, ergo potential conflict and trouble, and Coates’s canvases are appropriately busy and calculatedly unnerving. Bacchanal, a large painting, depicts the jangled co-location of lush plant life, bemused animals, and humans naked but often distressed. No doubt intentionally, it’s a far cry from Nicolas Poussin’s eponymous seventeenth-century study ingenuously celebrating sensuality. For Coates, the title sharply intimates collective hedonism gone awry. Touché.