Patricia Coates

Canadian artist Patricia Coates works in performance, installation, video, living material (indigenous trees grown from seed), and social media. She weaves themes of entropy, enthalpy, and the absurd as a way to disclose a paradox of the human condition: our constructive and destructive selves. Her work attempts to uncover something about who we are and how we have come to a tipping point of crisis. The persona, the artist’s alter ego, is a woman refusing limits. Yet, her call for restitution plays out like a Sisyphean gesture: Tenacity and futility reign.
In her exhibition The Madness and the Mess, Coates will present two filmic works, Lucy Palustris and Winter, and a series of photos documenting Coates’s endurance performance work in Canada and, more recently, in Berlin.