NYAB Event - J. Coleman “Wandering Stars”

J. Coleman “Wandering Stars”

Pandemic Gallery

This event has ended.

J. Coleman’s art is an art of spiritual struggle that emerges out of a deeply felt and intuitive engagement with a wide range of spiritual and philosophical traditions. Buddhism and Christianity are important sources, but so are Jungian and Freudian psychology and a host of eastern and western secular thinkers. The wide-ranging cultural sources from which Coleman’s art is drawn are filtered though a subjectivity focused on and passionately devoted to spiritual progress. Coleman’s art is an autobiographical art of the psyche. It is an art born of suffering, emerging out of darkness, an art invested with perhaps equal measures of psychological power and metaphysical uncertainty, profound confidence and intense self doubt.

The title of this series of ten paintings, Wandering Stars, is indicative of the multivalent nature of Coleman’s artistic statement. The title is drawn primarily from verse 13 of the General Epistle of Jude: “Raging Waves of the sea, foaming out their own shame: wandering stars, to whom is reserved the blackness of darkness forever.” However, Coleman has also stated that the title connects to a quote from Frederich Nietzche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra in which Zarathustra, the prophet of the overman, states “I tell you: one must still have chaos in one, to give birth to a dancing star. I tell you: you have still chaos in you.” More directly, however, the title refers to panoply of characters that enact the drama and embody the conflicting energies of Coleman’s psyche.