Sanchez Art Center

November 7 - December 21, 2003

Artweek, Debra Koppman

October 2003

Sanchez Art Center’s Main Gallery presents Life Lines, a solo exhibition of paintings and sculpture by Cheryl Coon. 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.

Installations are created using natural and easily found domestic materials which are manipulated through non-artmaking activities such as walking, throwing objects and mopping. Organism is a wall-mounted installation created with used coffee filters that have been waxed and formed into flower-like forms and attached, seemingly randomly, to a wall. In Thread & Nails, small, round, dangerous-looking forms of nails have been thrown violently at the wall and pop out from every direction, a commentary perhaps on the dangerous quality of repetitive domestic activities.

Baja is a 9-by-5-foot paneled grid, consisting of forty-five amber-colored painted sheets of Plexiglas. Each panel is created through translucent layers of paint, and represents one part of an image suggesting metamorphosis. As a whole, the image remains fragmentary, suggesting our pieced-together understanding of life’s incessant processes. Devotions’s daily objects are frozen, like memories, metaphorically into wax, transforming them from the ordinary into the arresting and everlasting. Salt (Mohave) is a series of eleven painted and textured panels that consider natural earthy materials and the inevitable changes they experience.