9.25.2013

Coarse Dark Sorrows - Nightshade version


Coarse is back with a Nightshade verison of their previous work Dark Sorrows.  This piece is going to be special, coming in as a 1:1 scale replica of the original sculpture created by Mark Landwehr and Sven Waschk for their Chicago solo Exhibition "Souls Gone Mad" at Rotofugi gallery. 

This second and final edition comes in all new desaturated natural tones. The statue is contained in a screen-printed wooden box and securely encased in black sponge. Each figure comes with a signed and numbered certificate!  As always, Coarse has imbued their piece with their signature slick clean lines and infused it with their strange eye catching melancholy. This one is going to be a head turner for sure.  If I may play 'art critique' for a i minute, I feel it evokes a sad feeling, lamenting the gradual and continual loss of the animal worl to human expansion, and in this unending expansion, we end up losing our own 'natural instincts' and in effect, our own souls....  I also like the purple box.

What do you think?







- from Coarse's newsletter

Something moves in the moonlight.A beast, Fever thinks. He is paralysed and shaken, frozen in place. From his spot in the middle of the woods, he can see long ears and a longer snout, eyes dark like wells dug too deep. The creature stands still, lurking against the darkness of a tree trunk. He is waiting for me, Fever thinks.

In an instant, a breeze descends upon the forest and turns the demon head to face him. Fever holds back a scream as the impossible reveals itself: the beast has no neck, no body, nothing beneath its hovering head.

Fever knows he should go the other way, but he inches towards it, scanning the forest floor for the remains of the creature and any signs of the phantom body that keeps it floating in the air.

Another breeze pushes through the woods, but this one is stronger. The trees above waver in unison, shedding for a moment enough moonlight for Fever to see what levitates before him: not a monster at all, but a mask, it seems, hanging from a low branch.

Fever sighs, relieved, and reaches up to the head to inspect it. He tries pulling it down and the branch snaps off, the mask falling to the ground. Fever kneels down to pick it up and instinctively sets it on his head, the weight of it slightly sinking his hands into the mud.

He expects to see only darkness, or that perhaps there will be slits through which he can peer. Maybe he can wear the mask to ward off the bad omens. He can be the forest’s resident scarecrow.

But when the mask is over his head, Fever sees something. Something moving. At first it is blurry, but slowly it comes into focus. There is water, and a girl, and two large hands gripping oars, rowing. At first he thinks he is dreaming things up, so he removes the mask and shakes his head, but when he puts it back on again, the scene is the same. The boat is moving slowly through the water. And what is that? That in the distance? It looks like a forest. Could it be this forest? Fever can see a dock jutting out from the coastline.

He tries to move his head around to see what is behind him—what the boat is sailing towards—but the mask will only show him what it wants to show him. Whoever’s eyes Fever is in controls what he sees.

Suddenly, the girl in the boat looks up, and Fever nearly falls backwards when he sees her face. It is his sister staring up at him. It is Ruth crouching in the boat. Fever wonders how she got here in this forest in his dream. He wonders if she is staring into the same mask he is wearing, if she can see him through those dead and dreadful eyes.

Ruth begins to cry, and Fever tries to reach out his hands to console her, but the hands of the beast keep rowing forward, unaware of Fever’s attempts.

I must find her, Fever thinks, shuddering at the idea of any creature who would wear this mask in the darkness of the night.


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