Sub-Rural #45, Petah Coyne at the Chazen

Petah Coyne is a well-recognized, well-vetted, well-travelled, and well-deserved darling of art critics and curators. An example of her thirst for fabricating radically poignant, sometimes agonizing, often spellbinding neo-natural phenomena just closed in the exhibition “How Much A Heart Can Hold,” at the Chazen Museum of Art in Madison. Coyne’s oeuvre was represented by a selection of twelve plus sculptures and installation hybrids. “How Much” was curated by Chazen director Amy Gilman who selected a body of work that focused on the cultural contributions of women seen through the visceral labor of Coyne’s practice.

Coyne is celebrated for constructing enigmatic anti-sculpture, using exotic materials that in themselves are bourgeoning with fertility and treasure. A common list of material includes specially formulated wax, pigment, silk flowers, silk/rayon velvet, tassels, cast-wax statuary figures, human hair, black pearl-headed hat pins, wire thread, felt, cotton batting, chicken-wire fencing, wood, Masonite, steel, acrylic paint, nails, bolts, screws, cable, Velcro, plastic, etc.  Incredibly dense, they absorb rather than reflect light and that’s true for content as well. Her painstakingly graphic/operatic approach to building objects injects subjectivity deep inside untamed organic configurations with ruptured surfaces that overwhelm identity. Intense alternating dark and light pigments verge on her only critical formal polarity. Monumental alien forms meld figuration with mini-landscape pedestals, some which appear to be unraveling in microcosmic and/or macrocosmic vegetation .

Coyne is known to be a voracious reader who invests her work with the sensibilities of classic and contemporary literature. Her subjects are not shaped from narratives but female characters to whom she gives homage. She refers to them as “her girls” to which she is an imaginary guardian and attends to them as family years after they’ve been served-up and transmogrified. Noted for encouraging viewers to construct their own interpretation of these remarkably complex forms, she plies the gallery with shadowy clues and abundant dark passages. Her work shares a composite of popular taste for epic Dickens and Pasternack, mortality in Wagner, and dread in Koji Suzukian.

“Untitled #1411 (Jane Austin)” is an elite member of her body of white effigies. Its ovoid mask feign’s an enormous dried flower bundle suspended from the rafters. Beneath is a floor of gigantic spore forms. The volumetric spectacle is congested with a variety of artificial blooms and coiled tendrils that may or may not be intended to shadow the spatiotemporal flux of the texts and biographic details of the late 18^th century novelist.

The sculptor is drawn to Latin American and Italian cathedral ornamentation, and it relates a good deal about the nature of her lapsed Catholicism. The show’s enormous grouping of floral decadence calls to mind the hallowed aspirations of turbulent church architecture. Such spaces are replete with melting candle wax and floral embellishments which the artist channels through the inflation of reliquary details and figurines. They’re wonderfully post-ecclesiastic, a solemn time bridge to cloudy late Baroque saint-based mysteries.