Costumes, Codes, and Culture

Paintings by Jim Coates
August 31, 2008 thru October 4, 2008
Opening Reception:
August 31 from 1pm to 5pm

List of Works

1.Marias' Shoe
2. Maria's Desk
3. Maria's Make Up
4. Red Light Signal
5. Red Light-Green Light
6. Marseille Dialogue
7. Sweetish Girl
8.Central America Location 1
9. Central America Location 2
10. Mexican Girl with Popsicle
11. Thailand Windows
12. Girl from Lopburi

The paintings in the show I call Costumes, Codes, and Culture were done as part of my doctorial studies at NYU where I received a Doctor of Arts degree in 1996; my research paper was entitled In the Light of Desire: Painting as a Form of Inquiry Into the Aesthetic Nature of Being There.The studies involved many fields but primarily aesthetics, phenomenology, and psychology. In a way, I was looking for the holy grail of the Kantian pure aesthetic response, which I believed, and still do, lies in certain signifiers that have a Freudian slant. Thus the idea of documenting costumes and articles of adornment of prostitutes and looking for both formal and sign similarities in other parts of the social world. Time and money prevented me from traveling to far and wide, but I thnk the effort was successful in that I was able to link Freudian ideology with Kantian philosophy. In an existential, solipsistic, monadic phenomenological universe it gives something of an assurance that humanity truely can be connected both locally and beyond.