710 West Main Street
Louisville, KY 40202
(502) 727-3909
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Hours: Wednesday – Saturday Noon -4pm, or by appointment
COASH + JONES
Featuring Julia Coash and Phillip Jones
Dates: September 26 – November 9, 2025
Events: Artist Reception September 26, 5:30-7:30pm
Julia Coash and Phillip Jones began collaborating on photographs in 1993. However, each brought with them many years of experience in painting and drawing in addition to photography. Much of the works’ tension and interest develops out of its suggestion of drawing as well from its union of two distinct sensibilities. The complex forms and willow-charcoal like lines made by draped seaweed, tent caterpillar nests or metal tailings recall Coash’s abstract expressionist paintings. Jones’ figural paintings are echoed in the more structure organizations of recognizable bottle stoppers and doll fragments. As a suite, the combined energies of order and chaos, light and chiaroscuro, and gestural movement and static object, unite in multilayered works that are both, orchestrated and impromptu, narrative and open to interpretation.
The work plays on photography’s ability to simultaneously distance and clarify the material world. Scale and focus are used to envelop the banal with mystery and transform the mundane in ways similar the Russian Formalist’s strategy of defamiliarization and poetic displacement. Light and shadow alchemically alter a wire whisk or water pistol such that recognition of their true scale and materiality comes as a jolt, an explicit reminder of the implicit beauty and terror which surrounds us in the everyday world. Like Picasso’s bull’s head where one can simultaneously see the bull and the bicycle parts from which it is made, Coash and Jones’ photographs invite the eye to oscillate between seeing the abstract compositional whole or focusing on a representational iconic part.
However, unlike the flatness of traditional collage, these photographs take advantage of light’s ability to give depth and dimensionality. The effect of infinite spatial recession and multiple light sources is effectively contrasted against the graphic impact and impenetrability of the seemingly blacker than black lines and areas drawn across the surface. Between these layered readings, each composition presents a miniature world of mysterious artifacts suspended in a variety of ethereal atmospheres.