I first learned of Petah Coyne’s work when I saw her exhibit Everything That Rises Must Converge at MASS MoCA this summer, and I was initially unenthused about many of her sculptures (and still am); often huge sprawling masses with taxidermied birds and beasts among twisting growths of wax, string, and god knows what else. She makes references to countless cultures, historical events, religion, and anything else imaginable and reframes them in a way personally relevant to her, a process of drawing associations and finding new contexts. Unfortunately I am not immediately drawn by much of her aesthetic choices, what I would call “overblown” or “bloated,” although some of her simpler forms are striking and her more abstracted imagery leads to interesting and beautiful results.
Untitled # 1093 (Buddha Boy), 2001–2003. From arttattler.com's review of Coyne's MASS MoCA exhibit. This is one of the good ones.
Also unfortunate is that her photography is often relegated into the backseat of her canon . It was hard for me to believe that the two mediums were tackled by the same individual, since Coyne’s sculptures are elaborate and intricate, her photographs are simple, black and white, and blurry often to the point of unrecognizable. They’re photographs of motion in motion (she, as well as the subjects, are in transit), creating an unearthly feel for fairly mundane subject matter. It’s frustrating that it seems that Coyne has an entirely different approach between her photographs and sculptures; even conceptually they seem disparate even though they may address similar topics. For example, mortality is a theme she may attend to, but while her photographs convey transience, her sculptures are immovable. What can she express between the two media seem to contradict each other to some extent.
Untitled (#1039P-01) Bridal Series, 2001. From her exhibition at the Julie Saul Gallery in New York, late 2001.
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