Archive 2019-20
Marcus Coates
- Venue: HERB, Herschel Building
- Start: Tue, 08 Oct 2019 17:15:00 BST
- End: Tue, 08 Oct 2019 18:30:00 BST
Marcus Coates is an artist whose work often focuses on the animal in order to ask questions about society. As his attention shifts between the non-human and human, so do the aesthetic strategies employed in his work. Through paper-based works, sculpture, video, site-specific commissions, and events, Coates produces encounters with the natural world that are deeply social. Sometimes these encounters are through representational forms, reminiscent of the systems of identification employed to organise and catalogue animal species. At other times, Coate's works manifest as gestures such as when he asked the Mayor of Fogo Island, Newfoundland, to make a public apology to an extinct bird or when he initiated a monthly programme of performances at Utrecht Train Station that marked events taking place simultaneously in nature. Sometimes humorous or irreverent in character, the works each throw a critical lens on human systems of value, bringing into focus ideas such as rarity and the commonplace, or states of liveness or extinction, that permeate the ways we understand ourselves, social interactions or the spaces that we occupy.