Nicole Coson's debut in the United States highlights her distinctive multidisciplinary approach, blending the traditions of painting and printmaking to explore inquiries related to globalization, belonging, and self. Through the mediums of printing, painting, and sculpture, Nicole Coson: In Passing draws inspiration from the artist's personal experience of moving from the Philippines to the United Kingdom at a young age.
At the heart of the exhibition are large-scale monochromatic linen works created using industrial-grade crates commonly used for the transportation and storage of food. These modular receptacles—frequently found in London's multicultural East End where Coson maintains her studio—undergo a unique and labor-intensive process. The artist assembles and arranges them, employing a combination of printmaking techniques, rigorous indexical mark-making, and the movements of her own body to form tightly stacked rectangular structures.
In these linen works, Coson methodically organizes, catalogs, and codifies seemingly mundane yet often overlooked objects into analog symbolic depictions. Upon closer examination, the initially precise geometry transforms, revealing wide sweeping brush strokes that turn the almost mathematical structure into a sweeping poem of organic patterns.
A focal point of the exhibition, and relocating the focus to Coson's native Philippines, is a substantial sculptural piece suspended from the ceiling. Comprising numerous chains adorned with hand-cast aluminum oyster shells, this work recreates the coastal landscapes of Aklan, Philippines, where cultivating mollusks dangle below the ocean surface from gridded bamboo stalks. Documenting the nuanced aquatic and temporal variations of their submerged ocean environment through acquired rings within their shells,the suspended oysters evoke both the passage of time and the mutable nature of existence. Here, Coson's exploration expands into the realms of the visible and the intangible, as well as the transformative.
Evoking the intersections between the organic and mechanical, printmaking and painting, the anonymous and personal, as well as a specific place and the notion of anywhere and nowhere at all, Coson explores distinctively modern themes related to personal memory, history, and material culture. Her work both reveals and obscures as it harmonizes materiality, the natural world, and categorical systems of classification to bestow form and understanding upon a perpetually moving world.
Press release courtesy SILVERLENS.
505 West 24th Street
New York, 10011
United States
www.silverlensgalleries.com
+1 646 449 9400
Tuesday – Saturday
10am – 6pm