Winter

Patricia Coates is a multi-disciplinary artist working in film, installation and performance who explores the beauty and brutality of a degraded landscape and our transient existence within it. A call for restitution plays out like a Sisyphean gesture. Fecundity and death, care and violence are set against each other to create a psychic tension within the character Lucy Palustris, the artist’s alter-ego. The work probes issues of the Anthropocene while creeping into the physiological landscape of the persona. Lucy, a solitary woman in the landscape or built environment, manifests a conflicted relationship with the living world. Is she an agency of care, a de-stabilizing force, or a menacing presence? Ultimately, the artist attempts to uncover something about who we are as she addresses the question: How have we come to this tipping point of crisis? Lucy’s efforts are deliberate, tenacious though perhaps quixotic. Is her role (or the role of art itself) a necessary resistance or a futile intervention? There is a bit of Lucy in all of us: our complicity and our resilience. A tragic-comedic tone permeates her actions and her costume: A subplot speaks to notions of gender, race and class. Costume performance and the film medium itself pokes fun at the stereotype of the middle-class white woman; more specifically, Hollywood film stereotypes. Lucy simultaneously clings to and subverts constructed notions of ‘norms’ that linger in her consciousness and, more generally, remain pervasive in today’ s society.
Coates has received numerous Canada Council and Ontario Arts Council grants to support her work which is shown internationally.