In her first solo exhibition in New York in nearly a decade, Petah Coyne (CRF 2005) conceives ambitious tableaux that evoke cross-cultural themes of vanity, grief, and tragedy.
Coyne is known for championing and channeling female voices, and her new velvet work, “Untitled #1379 (The Doctor’s Wife),” was conceived in 1997, whilst she was thinking about the push and pull that can happen between sisters, mothers and daughters, feminists. She returned to the piece two years ago, using as her touchstone a 1966 novel about bitter female competition by Sawako Ariyoshi. The writings of Flannery O’Connor, Zora Neale Hurston and Joan Didion, among others, have also long infiltrated her work.
In “Untitled #1379 (The Doctor’s Wife)” — one of her many extravagant and psychologically complex sculptures, two shrouded female figures rise from a sumptuous landscape of dark velvet and wax-dipped silk flowers. One is imperious in posture, the other turns away in stubborn resistance. Their tense standoff seems to charge the roiling swells and eddies of material between them.
A firsthand witness to how tensions can fracture a group of women, Ms. Coyne believes that “this is such a great time for women, but if we don’t evolve we’re just going to keep going around and around. I want to see my generation help the next generation.” She hopes her sculptures expose deep wells of meaning and memory and relationship that leads to reflection for viewers, all the while intermingling ideas of beauty and death.
Coyne’s work is on show through October 27th.