Peter Coffin Perfect If On

The Andrew Kreps Gallery is pleased to present Perfect If On, the first solo exhibition in New York of work by Peter Coffin. Through investigating the paranormal, Coffin's work encourages the viewer to negotiate alternative modes of consciousness and acknowledge the subjectivity of science.

The centerpiece of the exhibition is a greenhouse installed inside the gallery as a performance space in which musicians and sound artists communicate with plants. In this work, no attempt is made to validate the evidence that already exists to support the phenomenon that plants respond to music. Rather the performers are there simply to engage intuitively with the plants. A calendar at the entrance of the gallery lists scheduled performances. A soundtrack designed for the plants' enjoyment plays when performers are not interacting directly with the installation.

Around the gallery are a series of portraits, unframed photographs of auras, resting on shelves like specimens displayed in a laboratory. The photographs are taken with a specialized Polaroid camera developed to capture auric color fields. The subjects of the auras have been removed so that only the color fields that comprise the auras remain. These photographs give substance to that which is normally invisible.

Lining the walls behind the aura photographs is a red marker drawing that resembles a flow chart. The drawing was made in the spirit of automatic drawing as a sub-conscious channel. Like the aura photographs, the wall drawing also gives substance to the invisible, in this case telepathy itself.

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Peter Coffin "Perfect If On"