Jennifer Coates “Toxic Halo”

High Noon

[Image: Jennifer Coates "Lion-Headed Bathers" (2019) acrylic on canvas, 12 x 16 in.]

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“What does it mean to want to draw oneself to and into holiness, history, and ritual without the myopia required to fully believe? A blazing at shapes’ edges shimmers and wavers where the blinders would need to be for full immersion. The colors make a kind of stop–go–caution all at once, multivalent beckoning and warning. These haloes are not tidy, symbolic rings around a blessed head but pulsing forces of light and color animating the landscape itself. The sense of the spiritual endures, but these haloes could be oil spills, ripples in runoff, radioactive emissions or bombardment, force fields, or psychedelic distortions as easily as spiritual auras or denominational symbolism. Theirs are the warning colors that in nature might mean do not ingest, aposematic. Their energies activate attention and question what acts upon and what is acted upon.”

- Dora Malech, On Jennifer Coates’s “Toxic Halo,” 2020