Now I am terrified at the Earth, it is that calm and patient,

It grows such sweet things out of such corruptions,

It turns harmless and stainless on its axis, with such endless successions of diseas’d corpses,

It distills such exquisite winds out of such infused fetor,

It renews with such unwitting looks its prodigal, annual, sumptuous crops,

It gives such divine materials to men, and accepts such leavings from them at last.

— Walt Whitman “This Compost” from Leaves of Grass, 1856

Tyler Park Presents is pleased to announce This Compost, the gallery’s first solo exhibition with Brooklyn-based artist Jennifer Coates. The exhibition will be on view from April 11 - May 17, 2025.

Jennifer Coates’ landscape paintings are both idyllic and toxic. Pulsing with saturated color, dense with pictorial detail, her canvases are built up through accumulating layers of acrylic and spray paint. They are a celebration of trees, plants, rocks, animals and insects, but realized through polymer and aerosol: by-products of industrial factories. 

Walt Whitman was writing at the height of Romanticism. His rapturous physical engagement with the natural world was, like other Romantic poets and artists, due in part to the Industrial Revolution and its effect on the environment. An array of intensely colored pigments were synthesized from the sludge-y runoff of coal-powered factories. Painters like Turner and Monet used the newly heightened palette to render atmospheric landscapes that were often smoggy and smoke-filled.  

Coates engages with this alchemy embedded in the history of synthetic chemistry, as well as the history of atmospheric landscape painting. Her paintings are compost piles of pictorial marks, automatist spills and imagery that gets buried and resurrected over and over. She teases meaning out of tangles of activity: sludge turns magical, mess becomes picture. Many of Coates’s recent paintings depict votives, “wish trees,” and make-shift pagan altars.

During a family trip to Cornwall, England last summer (Coates was born in England) she noticed trees near ancient wells and ruins that were weighed down with hanging items affixed to branches. Rags, keychains, photos, dolls, necklaces— objects that represent memories, prayers, hopes— are placed on the tree to communicate with an unseen spirit world. The wish/ votive reverberates with the painted mark on the canvas: they are both intentional ‘leavings’ that seek connection across time and space with entities that may or may not materialize.

Jennifer Coates lives and works in Brooklyn, NY and Lakewood, PA. Jennifer was the 2021 recipient of the John Koch Art Award in Painting from the American Academy of Arts and Letters; a 2021 NYFA Award in painting; a 2019 Fellowship at the Civitella Ranieri Foundation; and a Sharpe Walentas Studio residency (2018-2019). Most recently, her work was included in the “Brooklyn Artists Show” at the Brooklyn Museum. Coates will be featured in the forthcoming book published by Brepols, “Nature into Art: Then and Now” edited by art historians Marcia Hall and Dana Prescott. Her 2024 solo exhibition “Edge Effects,” spanned two galleries in NYC at High Noon and Chart. Her work has also been written about in publications such as the Brooklyn Rail, Hyperallergic, Two Coats of Paint, Bomb Magazine, the Huffington Post, Art News, and Smithsonian Journeys.