NEW YORK, NY.- Silverlens New York is announcing that a solo exhibition by London-based Filipino artist Nicole Coson, opening today. For her debut, Coson will showcase a new series of work that investigates the symbolic qualities of the container as a pragmatic metaphor for the circulation of people, capital, and consumer goods in a world intricately connected through the movement of food.

Nicole Coson's debut in the United States highlights her distinctive multidisciplinary approach, blending the traditions of painting and printmaking to explore inquiries related to globalization, belonging, and self. Through the mediums of printing, painting, and sculpture, Nicole Coson: In Passing draws inspiration from the artist’s personal experience of moving from the Philippines to the United Kingdom at a young age.

At the heart of the exhibition are large-scale monochromatic linen works created using industrial-grade crates commonly used for the transportation and storage of food. These modular receptacles—frequently found in London's multicultural East End where Coson maintains her studio—undergo a unique and labor-intensive process. The artist assembles and arranges them, employing a combination of printmaking techniques, rigorous indexical mark-making, and the movements of her own body to form tightly stacked rectangular structures.

In these linen works, Coson methodically organizes, catalogs, and codifies seemingly mundane yet often overlooked objects into analog symbolic depictions. Upon closer examination, the initially precise geometry transforms, revealing wide sweeping brush strokes that turn the almost mathematical structure into a sweeping poem of organic patterns.

A focal point of the exhibition, and relocating the focus to Coson’s native Philippines, is a substantial sculptural piece suspended from the ceiling. Comprising numerous chains adorned with hand-cast aluminum oyster shells, this work recreates the coastal landscapes of Aklan, Philippines, where cultivating mollusks dangle below the ocean surface from gridded bamboo stalks. Documenting the nuanced aquatic and temporal variations of their submerged ocean environment through acquired rings within their shells, the suspended oysters evoke both the passage of time and the mutable nature of existence. Here, Coson's exploration expands into the realms of the visible and the intangible, as well as the transformative.

Evoking the intersections between the organic and mechanical, printmaking and painting, the anonymous and personal, as well as a specific place and the notion of anywhere and nowhere at all, Coson explores distinctively modern themes related to personal memory, history, and material culture. Her work both reveals and obscures as it harmonizes materiality, the natural world, and categorical systems of classification to bestow form and understanding upon a perpetually moving world.

Nicole Coson: In Passing will be on view at Silverlens New York through April 20, 2024.

NICOLE COSON

Nicole Coson (b. 1992, Manila) is a Filipino artist based in London. She holds an MFA in Painting from the Royal College of Art London. Working in printmaking, painting and sculpture, Coson’s work explores the process of image-making as it pertains to personal memory, history, and material culture. Coson’s printed canvases oscillate delicately between surface and depth: by integrating symbolically-loaded found objects into the etching press, concrete material culture transforms into analog, indexical images through their negative imprint. This imagistic oscillation between pattern, image, and object is embraced by Coson to tell stories of family, society, and coloniality, but never in straight-forward ways: rather, the artist is deeply committed to the aesthetic politics of opacity and by extension, privacy, secrecy, and intimacy. Rather than alluding to a hidden meaning behind her barrier motifs (camouflage patterns, window blinds, woven baskets, food crates), Coson invites us to study them as such—barriers—and the critical potential of visual obfuscation.

Coson’s work on canvas is supplemented by occasional culinary and publishing projects, such as the ongoing Food Stories: The Silkroad (2018–), where food is explored as a palimpsest of migration histories—of people, spices, and recipes. Coson was featured in Bloomberg New Contemporaries in 2020, and has since held solo exhibitions at Silverlens in Manila, Philippines and Ben Hunter Gallery in London, UK.