cheryl coon

cheryl coon



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copyright © 2008 cheryl coon ralphie coon

artinsight.org

Pacific Noise - podcast

episode 45, 5/18/2006

Femina Potens Gallery: cheryl coon, lucrecia troncoso, and sherry koyama

Folly 2006
Interview with Katie Croke
Folly 2006
www.follymag.com

Artweek

SubAnatomy at the Museum of Contemporary Art (pdf)
Colin Berry

With her gritty conceptual/performance piece Thread & Nails, San Francisco artist Cheryl Coon investigated the idea of harming our bodies. Using short sharp spikes and countless yards of wound thread, Coon fashioned lethal-looking balls the size of kiwis and, at SubAnatomy's opening, hurled against one wall, where they stuck. The simple work was hugely evocative, of everything from microscope blow-ups of viruses, spores, and pollen grains to Ninja throwing stars and Middle Eastern suicide bombings.

Give and Take: Sculpture/USF/2003
curated by Richard Kamler
Strange Company: A Creative Response to "Give and Take (pdf)

Glori Simmons

Artweek

Previews

Debra Koppman

Applying multiple layers of beeswax, sediment, ashes, salt, acrylic and raw pigments, Coon creates images of human skin, insects and fossils. Her method of working mirrors natural processes of geologic formation, erosion and disintegration, and becomes a commentary on the passage of time, human mortality and impermanence.

Form & Content Merge

Eastern Oregon University

Jeff Petersen

Coon makes complex installations made from natural materials (ashes, wax, plants) and domestic materials (thread, nails, coffee filters, paper) which cover the wall in beautiful, spreading, organic forms.

read the interview

Physics Room Annual 2001: Neural Notations

Cheryl Coon's work was both beautiful and terrifying, a sprawling constellation of flower or star‑like objects, each created from tacks wound into a ball of thread, and thrown as hard as possible at the wall, to protrude precariously from the gibbed wall. Its rhizomic construction was largely random, constrained by the limits of the wall space, and the installing gallery workers ability to throw. Each tiny object contained dozens of piercingly sharp metal tacks which dug into the edge of the wall, shimmering with palatable danger.

Anchorage Daily News: Opposites Attract

Mark Muro

San Francisco artist Cheryl Coon fuses the organic with the manmade, poetically tweaking our perceptions about art, natural science and the environment. ... Dried skeletal leaves, desiccated pods, beeswax and mud are combined with plastic, glass and paper to create a new, artificial context for these basic components of life. As in nature, the most successful examples of Coon’s art are dependent upon endless repetition, multiplicity, and variation. This is nowhere more apparent than in "Thread and Nails," a stunning arrangement of hundreds of star-shaped barbs that speckle the gallery's longest wall. Each prickly individual consists of a cluster of one-inch nails, wrapped together with thread. The mounting of this piece was accomplished by forcefully throwing the spiny faux-creatures onto the wall at random. The result is a powerful work of art, a beautiful constellation that seems to belong as much to the night sky as to a coral reef. Coon's obsessive labeling, cataloging and intricate systems for displaying these substances effectively transforms the art gallery into a hall of science. This relentless presentation of organism as artifact reflects our domination and total objectification of nature. Coon shows us art imitating nature imitating art and replants this perplexity in our consciousness.

Art Papers: Paper Rock Scissors

Carol Ladewig

The works in Paper Rock Scissors (San Francisco Arts Commission Gallery, May 3 – June 10), an exhibition curated by Cheryl Coon, a former writer for this publication, provided an opportunity to examine the work of artists who develop their thoughts and perceptions in a variety of media to create visual forms for non-verbal communications. The works in the show are, in Coon's words, "...like relics that show the accumulated moments spent: first in gathering preserving, and contemplating these materials, then in the time spent in the studio incorporating the materials into art." In contrast to the collecting of artist to create work, curators create temporary collections to be encountered in a particular space and time. The collection then disperses and returns to the studio or to another collection. The curator/collector's sensibility in gathering and displaying works by various artists adds a new dimension of meaning to the works as they visually interact.... The thread of memory runs through each of these artists' works. In assembling this ephemeral collection, Coon has provided us with the works of artists that are engaged in a thoughtful and thought-provoking process, a skilled exploration of materials, the process of making and thinking thus elaborating on fundamental aspects of our lives.

Santa Cruz Sentinel: UCSC Art Show Has Lots of Brain

Julia Chiapella

"Neural Notations" presents a collection of work by artists who explore the connection between the neurological and the emotional. Curated by Donna Leigh Schumacher, Neural Notations is a creatively insightful look into the vagaries and inspired musings that are the offspring of unusual brain functioning. Some of these conditions have been given terms such as monopolar affective disorder or manic depression. But the work transforms the conditions into inspired visions occupying time and place, rather than vague labels on a medical chart.

Like stars in a galaxy, Cheryl Coon's "Thread and Nails" is just that: thread and nails. Installed against the wall at the entrance of the gallery, this piece is a regally simple construction. Nails are joined together at an axis by white thread and affixed to the wall in a random pattern. The effect is a stunningly lucid piece, pitting agony and brilliance as not only counterparts but necessary allies.

Grants Pass Daily Courier: Art Imitates Life

Barbara Baily

Cheryl Coon's exhibit at the Fire House Gallery invites us to look at the structure and decay of living organisms through medicinal folklore... In "Botanica," Coon incorporates herbs, flowers, leaves, cicada exoskeletons, and other simple objects in her work. The show as a whole has the feel of a quirky exhibit at a pristine natural history museum.

Art Issues: San Francisco email

Mark Van Proyen

...Some of Cheryl Coon's sculpture also refer to Anzieu's idea of a skin ego, as they are often made of gauzy fabric that seems to contain the imprints of a hemorrhage of bodily fluid as an indicator of a life that was but is no more. Perhaps more to the point of these works is their connection to what Jacques Derrida has called "archive fever" in his philosophical musings about language’s inability to lay spectral ghosts to a rest. In some of Coon's works, this fever is played out in the form of creepy specimens displayed in jars set upon shelves or tabletops (the jars are said to contain snake oil as a key ingredient), while in others works, linguistic notations are applied to suggestive objects and materials (tea bags, old garter-belt snaps, and so forth), teasing out a hidden analogy between taxonomic labels and common epitaphs. The most persuasive work is a collection of thirty-six medieval-looking ninja balls made of plaster and carpet tacks affixed in a random pattern to the gallery wall. In them, we see in more direct terms the tacit violence archived by the other works; they have the potential to threaten the real epidermis of a careless viewer who gets too close to their dangerous-looking thistles.

Diablo Arts: Radical Notions

Kate Rothrock

A revolution has erupted in the sewing room. Creations with needle and thread that we once consigned to craft or women's work have been liberated and now have invaded the realm of fine art with a vengeance. ..."We associate needlework with order and tradition," says Carrie Lederer, curator of the Bedford Gallery. "But now, more than ever, there are sewing machines in studios, and artists are busily deconstructing what has been put together over hundreds of years."....Many works in the exhibition reach back, like Som's, into the artist's intimate past, causing one to reflect on sewing's relation to childhood memory. Artist Cheryl Coon found working with needle and thread a natural choice. ... Coon returned to memories of her mother, a nurse, removing stitches from her brother's knee, and of her father's morning shaving ritual to create My Nurse, a book whose pages hold double edged razor blades, safety pins, straight pins and small scissors. Among these items are garter snaps, adding a note of eros to the menacing implements.
read more

Artweek: Previews: Biomorph

Steven Jenkins

Students of art and science – in other words, virtually everyone other than Trent Lott – should pay close attention to Biomorph, a provocative, sometimes icky group exhibition for which always-incisive curator Cheryl Coon has brought together five Bay Area artists who locate life and death at the intersection of artistic experimentation and scientific investigation. By incorporating raw, organic materials into their creative processes, and by questioning ever-changing human roles within the biological passion play, the featured artists acknowledge both Darwinian survival-of-the-fittest ideology and the sick thrills of hit-and-run roadkill.

Los Angeles Times: Cryptic Imagery

Josef Woodard

For Cheryl Coon, showing in the New Media Gallery, the expressive point of departure is insects and fossils, depicted with the apt materials of beeswax and dry pigments.... Her technique and use of materials leads to a reflection on process as much as image, as in "Metamorphosis," with the twin images of a caterpillar and winged thing afloat in a mucoid, stick-looking bed of yellow-orange. Darker thoughts arise in "The Kafka Moth," in which an ambiguous insect could be seen as a protagonist in a Kafkaesque vignette, and emblem of alienation. ... Creepy and resilient, these insect and fossil impressions suggest a dimension beyond our everyday awareness.

Bay Area Reporter: Wonder Words

Steven Jenkins

Fahrenheit 451, a dynamic, linguistically rich exhibition on view at the San Francisco Art Commission Gallery, dispels all fears of books being banished to paper-strewn gulags. Borrowing its title from Ray Bradbury's classic dystopian novel in which all books are banned and burned (their pages torching up at a toasty 451 degrees), this group show features book-related works by nearly three dozen Bay Area artists who brandish words as weapons, puzzles, or prayers. Brilliantly curated by Cheryl Coon with an eye towards stylistic diversity, Fahrenheit 451 is a heady exploration of the thrills and hazards of ink on paper. As with any good book, there are too many profound musings, plot twists, and semiotic challenges in the exhibition to absorb in one reading.

Artweek: Cheryl Coon At Haines Gallery

Tony Reveaux

An image of a moth, risen from the chrysalis, may be an apt metaphor for the emerging artist. Cheryl Coon is one who demonstrates a genuine and authentic strength that is still in the process of reaching towards a more consummate realization. In several of her paintings, completed last year, a common theme is the central presence of a simply wrapped and bound cocoon-like form resting on a plane or within shelf-like structures. In these four large paintings, the moth, emergent and ascendant, is the subject. ... In a dedicated sculptural application of encaustic's materiality, she trowels, brushes, cuts, spreads and glazes planes of impasto so that the moth - seen from above or on a wall - thrusts a rough, chalky aura of both fragility and strength as it hovers above the hard greenish yellow background.