Rogue Community College - Fire House Gallery

Grants Pass, Oregon

March 30 – April 29, 2000

Grants Pass Daily Courier

Barbara Baily

April 6, 2000

Art Imitates Life:

Exhibits offer different ways of looking at the world – one quirky, one earthly

Cheryl Coon’s exhibit at the Fire House Gallery invites us to look at the structure and decay of living organisms through medicinal folklore, while April Richardson’s monotypes at the Grants Pass Museum of Art offer an earthy exploration of plant life. Both shows run through April.

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.

Wax-paper-mounted leaf skeletons, tea bags, string, and other white components, including the gallery space itself, enhance predominantly amber-toned objects ranging from the three acrylic skin casts of “Epidermis” to 12 petri-dish-like containers filled with amber-tinged fluid and seeds of different shapes and sizes in “Gestation.”

In “Thread and Nails,” sharp metallic pen-nib projections are bound into spheres by white string. The shapes look like wind-blown sycamore-seed clusters nailed to the wall at random, and they cast interesting shadows.

Many of the pieces are embellished with the names of human ailments and their herbal cures, all penned in quaint script.

The amusing “Queen’s Tea/Kid Gloves” features a long pair of elegant, tea-stained white leather gloves hanging behind a silver tray lined with neat, round, lace-edged tea bags. An overhead spotlight is focused on an official letter from Buckingham Palace, written to Coon’s mother in 1983, that sits on top of the tray. The letter is a courtly rejection of Mrs. Coon’s apparent invitation to the Queen to share tea with her during a royal visit to the West Coast. “Her schedule is a very busy one,” the letter says, “and, sadly, nothing more can be added to it at this stage.”

Coon holds a master’s degree in fine arts from the San Francisco Art Institute, and she’s shown her work in numerous group and solo exhibits throughout Northern California. In addition to the Fire House Gallery show, she’ll have three exhibits in Oregon this year.