Petah Coyne

Galerie Lelong/Julie Saul Gallery, New York
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In what season does Spring Snow and White Rain fall? Although these are the titles of Petah Coyne’s concurrent New York shows, answers are suggested neither in her monumental sculptures nor in her romantic photographs. Her titles are as enigmatic as those the ancient Chinese gave to their five-day seasonals; perfect and perplexing names like Pheasants Enter the Water Turning into Monster Clams.

Coyne’s poetic paradoxes are heightened by the knowledge that white rain suggests the black rain that fell after the Hiroshima bombing, while spring snow refers to Japanese author Yukio Mishima’s first book in his tetralogy “The Sea of Fertility.”

Towering, beribboned, and covered in wax drippings, the sculptures, which hang like impossible chandeliers from the gallery ceiling, are stoically festive—the one white and bombastically bridal, the other black and imposingly funereal. With this life and death scene so cogently set, the black-and-white photographs hung on surrounding walls—abstracted, blurred images of swooshing floor-length skirts, some with pretty bare feet dancing out under lifted hems—appear easy and airy, too full of motion to hold any meaning. Where the central pair of sculptures provides the paradox of weighty lightness and light weightiness, the photographs are merely puffs of contrasting tones, debutante satin and tulle.

Other accumulations of whiteness might recall angel’s food cake or bubble baths, but the copious layers of candle wax that Coyne has dripped and poured over various sculptural configurations of fake flowers, bundles of ribbon, handmade birds, and Virgin Mary statuettes speak instead of time, its passage and accretion, and its ability to white things out. Where moss, mold, or vines grow darkly and steadily, Coyne’s wax builds up a translucence that neutralizes, homogenizes, and turns everything into a fairy tale.

More sculptures, scattered fragments of some other place—an ancient chandelier, a long forgotten garden, figurines from a rococo church, peacocks perched too long—are all frozen, though not solely by the wax layers. They are frozen also by the metaphors they invoke: of time elapsing, of moments that changed the world, of being at the will of the elements.




Lori Waxman