1053 Gallery: Jennifer Coates Builds a Contemporary Folklore

Jennifer Coates Builds a Contemporary Folklore at 1053 Gallery

by Robert Brune

     Jennifer Coates’ exhibition Aniline Sky at 1053 Gallery transforms the landscape into something stranger and more enchanting than a simple view of nature. Filled with hanging charms, spectral figures, flowers, fragments of architecture, ribbons, and mysterious offerings, the paintings feel less like observations of the natural world and more like portals into contemporary folklore.

   The exhibition’s imagery is rooted in real places, but Coates approaches landscape as a site where memory, history, myth, and human activity accumulate over time. The result is a body of work that feels both ancient and contemporary, as though viewers have stumbled upon hidden shrines deep within the forest.

     One of the exhibition’s most compelling paintings centers on a dense canopy of suspended objects. Portraits, shells, beads, ornaments, and symbolic fragments hang above lush vegetation, recalling the tradition of wishing trees where personal tokens are left behind. The painting functions like an archive of collective memory, filled with traces of lives both remembered and forgotten.

     Coates traces some of this fascination with relics and ruins back to her artistic training. “There are sculptures of ancient classical sculpture, kind of remnants that haunt the canvases,” she said. “I realized that may have been cemented into my mind from back in undergrad when I was spending hours drawing in the cast hall.”

      Her interest in the landscape extends beyond aesthetics. A longtime gardener, Coates studies not only cultivated plants but also the weeds that emerge around them. “I started just drawing the weeds and learning their medicinal history and their histories and folklore or myth,” she said. “Suddenly, the landscape kind of wakes up around you, the more you learn about each particular plant.”

     That sense of awakening is visible throughout Aniline Sky. Plants, butterflies, and flowers appear alongside ghostlike blue figures and fragments of masonry walls. Human-made structures emerge from dense vegetation only to dissolve back into it. The paintings suggest places where nature has reclaimed what people once built, while preserving traces of their presence.

Several works also draw inspiration from abandoned industrial sites in Pennsylvania. Coates described exploring forgotten coal, processing facilities and military bunkers that felt simultaneously modern and ancient.

     “I was thinking about these sacred ruined sites with all these stories and history and human presence attached to them,” she said. “It felt ancient to me. It felt like this incredible fusion of ancient architecture and this post-industrial landscape.” That idea of deep time runs throughout the exhibition. Crumbling walls, graffiti, wild growth, and symbolic objects coexist within the same visual space. Rather than separating nature from culture, Coates presents them as inseparable forces continually reshaping one another.

     The paintings are equally remarkable for their color. Saturated violets, electric blues, luminous reds, and glowing greens create an atmosphere that feels almost bioluminescent. Coates has long been drawn to color’s transformative potential and its connection to science and technology.

    “I love thinking about technological innovations and color,” she said. “If you think about imaging and how colors are heightened in images of outer space or blood cells, scientists use techniques that have heightened color relationships so you can see patterns.” That fascination with synthetic pigments and luminous color contributes to the dreamlike quality of the work. Coates noted that she has always pursued “a sense of light that the image, the things in the painting, are emanating their own light sources.”

    Throughout Aniline Sky, dense layers of marks, patterns, and imagery accumulate into compositions that reward slow looking. New details emerge with each viewing. Butterflies become symbols. Flowers become offerings. Ruins become temples. Forests become stages for rituals whose meanings remain deliberately unresolved.

    The exhibition’s greatest strength is its embrace of ambiguity. These paintings do not offer a straightforward environmental message, nor do they settle into nostalgia. Instead, they explore how stories attach themselves to places and how landscapes become repositories of memory.

     “I’ve become really interested in the fact that it’s a contemporary version of that,” Coates said, referring to the layering of human traces across time. “There’s this feeling of deep time and of leaving the things that people leave behind to say, ‘I was here.'” In Aniline Sky, the Catskills become more than scenery. They become a living mythology, rich with beauty, mystery, and the enduring traces of human imagination.

   Jennifer Coates’ Aniline Sky is on view at 1053 Gallery in Fleischmanns through July 5.