MADISON, Wisconsin — Throughout history, women have been swaddled in satins, velvets, and crinkly chiffons with adornments so excessive that they curtail movement. Elaborate hairstyles and high heels — expressions of a culture’s fickle notions of beauty — might seem innocuous, but they too constrict women. Women have been bought, sold, and forced to give up rights through ritual passages such as marriage. These transitions are often accompanied by feasts, dances, cakes, and decorations that conceal what waits in the shadows: decay and often the exchange of creative production for security.
Petah Coyne wields remarkable force in addressing female oppression, going directly for the roots of control: the often disguised or invisible forces that diminish female agency. At age 71, the artist has stayed a maximalist course. Her work sits between abundance and suffocation, landing squarely in the sublime. She uses the very tools of seduction (flowers, velvets, pearls) to serve uncomfortable truths.
Coyne’s solo exhibition at the Chazen Museum of Art aptly titled How Much A Heart Can Hold, presents nine of her oversized sculptures dating from 1997 to 2023 in open, dimly lit spaces, along with a wall-sized photo installation. The mood is baroque and the scale larger than life — to walk into the gallery is to be shrunk into the smallness of our human bearing, to be reminded of the perishability of our imprint.
Women’s Work, the first of the exhibition’s three section, opens with “Untitled 1378 (Zelda Fitzgerald)” (1997–2013), from the museum’s permanent collection. Wax-coated silk flowers, pearls, candles, ribbons, glue, knitting needles, a cast wax figure, rubber, steel, wood, and other materials blossom into a melty, flamboyant, cake-like form. Here, the sweetness has gone too far, caving in on itself. Kept in a glass vitrine as if to slow its decay, it recalls Sleeping Beauty, a relic of hope deflated by inevitable deterioration. Overshadowed by her famous husband, Zelda Fitzgerald struggled to retain her own identity. Though sometimes mentally unmoored, she kept writing despite being judged by and encased in the public’s gaze. “Untitled #1568 (Zora Neale Hurston),” the most recent work in the show (2023-2024), and “Untitled #1411” (Jane Austen)” (2016–19), extend the artist’s tribute to women writers who surmounted obstacles. Hurston’s memorial takes the form of a wire, vine-encrusted fence upon which red, white, and black silk flowers blossom and fall to the floor. The Jane Austen piece hangs from the ceiling, a chandelier of crusty, wax-covered white and gray flowers topped with coral-like lichen. It could be a bride’s bouquet, frothy and celebratory, or a cave encrustation dripping flowery tears for the women who didn’t survive the fight.
The next section, Women Obscured & Transformed, is dominated by a work that left me speechless, “Untitled #720 (Eguchi’s Ghost)” (1992–2007). Suspended from the ceiling is what looks like a huge wig, 10 feet tall, seemingly made of coiled and tangled gray hair. A small, dark opening at the top suggests space for a head. This piece, with its tone of mythical darkness, displays the highest creep factor in the exhibition. An architectural ode to witchy prowess, it is like something that came out of a drain — all the hair ever brushed into a proverbial sink. Like many of Coyne’s pieces, it is both repulsive and triumphant. Although the show sports no labels, a handout states that it is made of a shredded 1950s Airstream camper, not hair. This alone feels like an act of reclamation, taking the feel-good tropes of that decade’s nuclear family fantasies back to a load-bearing psychological state.
A nearby piece, “Untitled #918 (Kawabata)”(1997–98), is composed of horse hair. Huge braids snake and tangle on a low pedestal, as if they might wrap our ankles and pull us into a swampy netherworld. But aren’t braids innocent, cute, and paired with rosy cheeks? Or are those very braids an early lesson in compliance.
Coyne’s gestures of excess could come across as ornamental, or simply theatrical, were she not such an inventive sculptor. I was engaged throughout the show, shuffling silently with mouth agape. The elaborate physicality of the objects was impressive, but what left a greater impression on me was the weight of it all — the dankness, sadness, the implications of women playing along as they’re buried alive by laws and social mores. Despite their operatic intensity, the objects emit something more subtle, like a lingering scent. Oppression, sweetened with candlelight and hair ribbons, is a dangerous thing. We already sense the odor from real-life churches and courtrooms, where inequality looms.
In the final section, Women’s Relationships, is the largest tableaux, “Untitled #1379 (The Doctor’s Wife)” (1997–2018), named after a novel by Japanese writer Sawako Ariyoshi. Undulating, coiled dark velvet yardage generates a landscape that houses an abstract figure at each end. They seem lost, unavailable to one another, yet consigned to an eternity of drawing rooms and tea service. On the back wall is the multi-paneled photo project, “The Real Guerrillas: The Early Years” (2015–16), a collaboration with photographer Kathy Grove, to document the feminist collective that worked anonymously for nearly two decades to bring awareness to gender inequity in the art world. The act of memorializing hovers over this project. When a Guerrilla Girl passes away, the project will unveil her identity by adding her portrait to the wall. The more didactic nature of this work felt like it broke the spell of the installation, returning us to a less magical present. I wasn’t quite ready to leave.
Petah Coyne: How Much A Heart Can Hold continues at the Chazen Museum of Art (800 University Avenue, Madison, Wisconsin) through December 23. The exhibition was curated by Amy Gilman, director, Chazen Museum of Art.
