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headcans-oneshots-and-stuff · 4 years

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Do Angels giggle?

Warning: Mentioned death of multiple people, a teeny tiny bit of angst, swearing, but otherwise you should be fine Word count: 4k (sis snapped again)(I should really stop doing this tbh) Summary: A rumor of an angel kidnapping criminals and leads them to a path of justice and Jason is on the suspects track. He hasn’t expected to be caught and he surely hasn’t expected what met him there...

This was requested by @middevil465: 'Babe did you fall from heaven bc you seem to be a chaotic ever shifting sphere of eyes & wings making a sound not of this earth and I’m kind of hoping God sent you because this is terrifying' with jason x reader

Jason really didn't plan on this to happen. He didn't plan on getting caught while spying on the current suspect in a case of criminals disappearing only to re-appear with no memory of what happened and babbling of being lead to a better life by an angel. And he certainly didn't plan to end up in a warehouse that was decorated with a clearly religious altar and other things that heavily reminded him of the church. The only thing that wasn't church-y was the fact that he was tied to a - honestly not uncomfortable - chair in front of the altar. The worst fact was that he, too, couldn't remember how he ended up here. He had some flashes of memories, about how Bruce assigned him to the case, about how he found a man that all the criminals who found themselves 'victim' had met sometime before their disappearance and how he'd found and followed him before he blacked out.

And now he was here. He wasn't really afraid as much as he was concerned and curious about what was going to happen next. Bruce could easily track him as soon as he noticed he wasn't answering so there was also not much reason to try to escape before he knew what was going on here or if he was in any serious danger. Jason wasn't sure what to expect. Tortue, drugging, brainwashing? He knew the man must have some kind of secret weapon that made him able to re-write these criminals to his liking, but he wasn't quite sure why. Everyone in the cave had different theories. Bruce and Dick thought that he maybe got information about their 'businesses', deleted the memory and sold the info, Damian and (surprisingly enough) Tim thought that the criminals had been involved in something bigger, all of them involved somehow, and the person (or people) who hunted them down and changed their memories and life choices, were on a hunt for information. Steph and Cass had agreed that it was a cult or a conspiracy and Barbara had said that she wouldn't make any theories just yet, or rather not reveal hers. Jason had a more sinister thought though. He knew about the criminal world better than most others in his family, once having been a big part of it too, and he thought that whoever was able to do this, was slowly building an empire, first taking out smaller criminals, snitches and errand boys, maybe as to test their methods, before going for the big fish and re-writing them to take over their territory. It was honestly a good plan, but the fam wasn't really happy about it. Having an enemy that could delete and rewrite memories and demeanours could be a real threat. That was why Jason needed to find out how they did it. But he didn't see anything in the warehouse room that would implicate what they used for their plan, only all that church stuff, and Jason considered that it was probably something to harden the illusion that it was an angel who showed them the 'light'.

"I've seen thou have been awakened, man in the blooded hood," a male voice echoed through the large space and bounced off the walls. The man he had followed stepped in front of him in a robe that reminded him of a monk. "It's crimson, bitch," Jason snarkily responded and couldn't help the smirk on his face, but it didn't seem to even slightly faze him. "Many have found the devil in their words in this city, but we, the church of hope and new ways, have made it our mission to bring thou, wrongdoers, to a path of justice and good, to a path of the angel." So Cass and Stephanie were right after all? A cult, really? "So that's all very noble and all, at least in theory, but ya know, I'm kinda on your side. With hunting and jailing criminals and all that jazz." "Thou words are full of sin that thou not even recognize, but don't fret, we will free you of them, free you of the devil within and bring you on a path of belief and light, we will bring thou to face with the angel that hath shown us the way too." Now that was next-level crazy, Jason thought and rolled his eyes under his still worn helmet. "Well, knock yourself out," he sighed and leaned back in the chair. Seemingly listening to Jason, the man disappeared through a door and suddenly all the lights in the room went out, leaving Jason in complete darkness, unable to turn on the night vision in his helmet. He heard another door on the other side opening and light steps echoed through the room, but whoever came in didn't make any other sounds but that. Then he was blinded by the brightest light he had most likely ever seen and what his eyes saw when the light simmered down a bit and he got used to the brightness made him freeze to the core. The words that left his mouth next were the result of habit more than thought, but he said them nonetheless: "Babe did you fall from heaven because you seem to be a chaotic ever-shifting sphere of eyes and wings making a sound not of this earth and I'm kind of hoping God sent you because this is terrifying." He wasn't wrong though. In front of him was, in fact, actually an ever-shifting sphere of eyes and wings that was making sounds that were clearly not human, neither anything that he had ever heard off-world and even though Jason was by no means religious, he had heard enough about how the angels in the bible were described to identify this thing in front of him as an angel. Suddenly the ever so brave, fearless and cocky Jason Todd stared at that being in front of him and his hidden face was drawn by fear and terror. He could deal with torture and pain, he could deal with technology and drugs, but he couldn't deal with whatever would be happening next. What would be happening next? Well, whatever it was that he expected, it sure as hell wasn't what happened. The sphere that he feared more than he had feared anything in the last years started to giggle. GIGGLE! Do Angel's even giggle? How would I ever know if angels giggle? The glow died down and the shifting intensified, the eyes were closing and drawing together, the wings merging too until there was only one pair left and the sphere turned into a different form, something longer and more humanly shaped, until it did a final change and turned into a girl. And what a girl she was. Jason's breath was stolen by her and the atmosphere surrounding her. She looked stunning in every sense of the word, from the Y/S/C skin that was basically glowing with angelic shine, her hair that was somehow looking like a halo even though it was nothing like one and her face that seemed to be sculptured by whoever created this hellhole called life themselves. And don't let him get started on the pair off wings that she was still sporting on her back. It was quite honestly gigantic. So big that its lowest part was reaching the floor and the highest part was still a few inches higher than her head. He could imagine that they would fill out the entire room if she was to stretch them out and the thought alone made him somewhat fuzzy in his head. He wished he could describe their colour, but he was sure that it was none of the ones he had ever seen on any planet, ever, he wasn't even sure if his eyes should be humanly able to comprehend the colour and yet there he sat looking at them. He was so impressed by these celestial limbs that he didn't even notice the fact that the girl was, in fact, completely naked. But even if he'd notice it, he wouldn't have seen her body as something sexual. The way she was moving like it was completely natural would more likely make him feel ridiculous for ever thinking of a naked body as something as intimate. And then her voice. Her voice was even more divine than anything else, making his whole body tense up and relax simultaneously. "You are full of darkness, but your darkness is unlike anything else they have shown me," she stated matter-of-factly and she came close to him, rounding him a few times with curiosity in her eyes, "And not just your insides are different than the ones they showed me, your head seems to have a sort of protective shell, how magnificent." Is she talking about my helmet? Does she think it is a part of me? "Uhm, Miss Angel, that isn't a part of my body, it's removable," he said, surprised that he was even able to talk with his heart basically having stopped beating. Her eyes widened in child-like wonder and she kneeled down in front of him, her wings spreading out slightly beside her to accommodate the change in height. "Would it be okay if I were to take it off?" she asked in innocence that Jason has quite honestly never seen before. "Uhm, sure," Jason answered, completely having forgotten the whole reason that he was here in the first place. Her delicate hands slowly found their way to were his helmet laid over his ears and she looked into the general direction of were his eyes were, her Y/E/C orbs seemingly shifting colour every time she moved even an inch. "I'll try to be careful," she hummed and started trying to get it off, changing her tactic ever so often when she noticed that it wasn't working, but instead of telling her what to do, Jason just looked at the angel and couldn't find any words. Finally, after about two minutes, she managed to pull it off and carefully laid it down beside the chair, before finally leading her gaze to his now, except for the domino mask, uncovered face. She didn't say anything, just bringing her hands up to his face and tracing it, including every scar, no matter how little, and every edge. Even though he had been in awe before, now he could almost comprehend why the criminals changed their ways, hell, at that moment he'd burn the city down without hesitation if she'd asked for it. Finally, her fingers wandered over the edges of his mask and when he gave her a small nod of consent, she somehow managed to peel it off and free his eyes for her to see. He didn't mind that she now knew what he looked like, that she could now identify him, but to be honest, he didn't think much about it, too caught up in that moment and that moment only. Their eyes met in a moment of complete silence whit the only sound present in Jason's head was the pounding of his heart and the rushing of his blood. "You are really unlike the others aren't you?" her voice broke that moment, but he somehow knew that he wasn't expected to answer. For a few heartbeats, the two off them stayed in place, before the angel ruffled her feathers, the sound echoing through the warehouse, like dozens of birds flying away. She raised back to her full size, her wings folding back to where they had originally been. "Tell me, why do my saviours want me to bring you to the light? I can see that it is already in you, it may be clouded and darkened, but it is there," she asked him and her hand was cupping his cheek in an act that seemed unnoticed by herself as if she was doing it unconsciously. Jason wasn't quite sure how to respond to that question, but he noticed something else in what she said, something that formed confusion in him. "Your saviours? Shouldn't it be the other way around?" "How do you mean that?" the angel asked with honest naive confusion written over her face as she cocked her head to the side and folded her hand in front of her bare stomach. "Well, uh, I'm no expert by any means, but you're an angel right?" She nodded but kept quiet as if that question didn't give her a clue as to what he meant. "Uhm... Angels are creatures sent by God and...uhm...they are over humans, right? So how is that guy and whoever he works with your saviour? Is he Jesus or something?" What she answered was something he didn't even remotely expect. "Who?" "Jesus? Your Boss's son? God sent messiah to free all humans? Allegedly forgave us for our sins and got killed for that?" Jason rambled and tried to count down everything he still remembered. The angle put her hand in front of her mouth in shock at his words. "That sounds horrible, is he okay?" she asked in a tone that made it pretty clear to Jason that she did, first of all, not know who Jesus was, and second, had no idea what killing actually meant. "Uhm, sure, he's great, somewhere up there with his dad, I guess," Jason just shrugged, not really caring about that topic anymore and more focusing on all the facts about her being an angel that didn't add up. "Can you tell me about yourself?" he just boldly asked her, but it didn't seem to phase her at all, in fact, she brightened up at the possibility to tell him about her. "Uhm, I can't tell you much, but I was saved by the church of hope and new ways when they found me after what they called a miracle, they took care of me and explained to me that I was sent to them to be their tool to re-shape the world," she explained with a somewhat proud undertone, but Jason's feeling got cemented. The feeling that she had actually no idea what was going on around her and what she was used to do, and the feeling that she may not really be the sort of angel he, and seemingly she, believed she was. "Re-shape the world?" he investigated further, a small voice muttering theories in the back of his head. "Mhm," she nodded and her right wing folded itself slightly in front of her as if she was nervous or shy, "They bring men who are filled with darkness and they have me look into them, look if they have light and make me watch their mind, then they have told me to bring them into the sun, I show them the way that they tell me is right, make them believe in the church." Her words were slightly wary and Jason could recognize the doubt in them. She wasn't doing this voluntarily... "Do you want to do that?" he asked to clarify things for himself, and maybe also her. Her eyes wandered to the door the mock-monk had disappeared in and Jason could have sworn he saw something like fear in them. "I- Uhm- Yes," she nodded, but couldn't look at the man in front of her, she had almost turned her whole body away from him. "I don't believe you." "Why?" her voice wasn't as childish and curious and innocent anymore, it was small and fragile. "I'm not sure, but I think they are lying to you, I think you aren't an angel. I mean, you're sure as hell no human, but you're not an angel, at least not one in the...uhm..traditional sense." This seemed to gain her attention in a way that had her turning around again and made her take a step towards him. "Do you really think so? Because... I have tried to tell them, but they said no to all my questions, they told me that I am the tool for the church, that that is my only task and that I would be lost without them, but I can see it in them too. The darkness, they tell me to turn into light, is in them too, but they don't let me change it, they tell me I must see something that isn't there... And not only that... I have memories, memories of the Miracle. I see flashes of other people, people that make my heartache, and flashes of a building, one that looked like this room here on the inside. "And then there are other flashes, flashes I have at nights when I'm resting, there are loud noises and heat is licking at my skin, at my back, at my whole body, and there are so many screams." She seemingly didn't find the connection between those memories, but Jason sure as hell did. It was mainly a theory at that point, but he believed that she had been at church with her family when it burned down, maybe there was magic involved or she had the meta-gen inside her, but while her family burned she must have turned into the angel she was now, losing most of her memory in the process. The people that must have found her and figured out of the great powers she had, had decided to use her for their own sinister plans and she was none the wiser, Jason couldn't know if she had always been that naive and innocent, but she was now and, even though he had only known her for a matter of maybe half an hour, she had grown on him if he was being honest. "Can you see into other people's heads? Can you read other people's memories too?" he asked, a small plan forming in his mind. She looked at him in thought, but she seemingly was somewhat intrigued. "I believe so, I have only done it one or two times." "Read my mind, read my memories," he almost commanded, but she was taken off for other reasons. "Why would you want me to do that? My saviours tell me that it isn't my place to do so..." "I know this is confusing and what you will see will shock you, but I hope you will be able to trust me after that, trust me to help you, get you out of here." The prospect of being away from her 'saviours' seemed to make her interested, but there was something else that she had to know beforehand. "Will you stay with me? Will you take me with you? I can't be alone, I don't know where to go, what to do, I can't- don't think that I can survive all alone," she looked away and he could see the fear and pain, of not knowing what the future would hold in her whole demeanour, and he wanted nothing more than to take her in his arms, but the restraints that were still binding him to the chair were keeping him from doing so. "If you don't want to be, you won't be alone, I will take you with me, we will go through this together, okay?" "Okay," she smiled slightly and came to him, her hands hovering over the rope around his chest and, in a for Jason surprising turn of event, her palms started glowing and the rope basically disintegrated leaving him free to stand up, having to physically restrain himself from holding her. "This won't be happening to me too?" he asked gesturing to what was still left off the rope. And she giggled again. God, he had almost forgotten how heavenly that giggle was. "No, I don't think it will," she said in a tone as if she was honestly questioning her statement, but before he could say anything about it her hands found themselves on the sides of his temple and the last thing that echoed through the room before the angel fell unconscious in his arms was her scream.

When the angel woke up she felt utterly exhausted. She had seen everything that had ever happened in Jason's life, including his death and every time he had killed, and she had felt it like she was it who experienced it. It had literally drained her, but Jason was correct, as she woke up again, she trusted him with her life and more. She knew him now. Possibly better than anyone else in the world. And not only that, when her eyes opened he was the first thing she saw. She was laying in his lap, something that was astounding enough considering the giant wings that were spread out beside her and partly over Jason, and somewhere along her time of being in his memories he had taken off his brown leather jacket and had put it on her and zipped it up, keeping the, in normal standards, intimate parts of her body hidden from sight. What the angel couldn't see were the bodies of the people who had, in Jason's opinion, used you for the past few months that were stacked in the backroom and, if he was lucky, not dead. "Sorry you had to see this, but I wanted for you to be able to completely trust me," Jason whispered, his hands caressing through her hands. "It's okay, I understand," she hummed back and they both knew that she meant more than just the statement about him wanting her to trust him. "Can we leave now?" "Of course," he smiled and helped her up, having been made aware earlier when she passed out that her wings added more to her body weight than he had anticipated, but that was to expect, they were robust and spread out almost twice as big as Jason in width. The angel, who Jason really needed to find a name for, had the wing on the side opposite of where Jason stood beside her, drawn in, but the one that was on his side was spread out behind him like a shield, curling around him slightly, but he just smiled and slightly shook his head at that. He honestly really didn't know what it was about the girl, his angel, or the whole situation itself, but a really small part of him wanted to believe that maybe there was something like a bigger picture, maybe not necessarily a god, but something that had brought them together, something that had wanted to make him know that the two of them knowing each other was meant to be.

#Jason todd #jason todd x reader #red hood #red hood x reader #dc x reader #batfamily #batfam x reader #batfam #fluff #angst #oneshot

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dmyear3 · 6 years

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Obituary

This performance is the second in a series, both extending my project beyond inanimate pieces and into the live and theatrical – forming a cyclic narrative of life and death in interaction between my body and art objects. My first performance was of myself being “born” from a hollow sculpture resembling a human or animal carcass and performing improvised and very physical actions with a set of clay “bones”, my body a writhing and automatic medium between bodily states of birth and remains. For the next performance I wanted to retain the hugely important aspects of physicality and ritual, but in a very different form that is more pared-down and action-based (while still implying essentially the same narrative). The first element I decided on was the costume. I wanted to wear something that would act as a blank canvas which would physically record the event as gestural paint strokes, while also transforming my appearance in the performance. This resulted in making a very rough kimono-like garment with long drapery on the sleeves that would both obscure the form of my body and provide a lot of surface area to easily paint onto. I sketched out a few different versions of what the purpose would actually entail – originally it was to appear quite sacrificial and religious, with the painted garment crucified and suspended above the space. This version would have been performed in from of the stained-glass windows of the life drawing room where I performed, to provide a church-like setting. These connotations would align my interest in rebirth with biblical imagery such as the Second Coming of Christ, bringing the act of ritual into the classical European rather than the eastern references that have continuously popped up in regards to my work. It was only after already having a rough plan set out that I decided to store the paint inside of clay sculptures. I sculpted these pieces to resemble the ambiguous remains of body parts, as amorphous organic forms resembling bones and organs and flesh. The lack of colour and earthy material suggests age, withering and mummification. I filled them with a red-brown liquid (heavily watered-down acrylic paint) – the specific colour and density was partially inspired by a news story from earlier this year, about a sarcophagus that had been dug up and was discovered to be filled with a similar red-brown “water” – which was in fact ancient human remains decomposed to the point of liquidation. This reference to ancient remains, both in the appearance of the sculptures and the liquid they contained, ended up being a more important focal point of this piece to me rather than any religious connotation. I instead began to see the performance as a mournful act of transferring ancient bodies between forms of decay and new life – the body being a liquid that I attempt to reincarnate in the birth of new forms and continue the natural cycle of generational reiteration. An aspect of memory comes into play here, as I grasp at the remains and transcribe their very material onto myself. This led to me titling the work Obituary. I ended up drawing indistinct human figures onto the surfaces of my garment, and in the performance I attempted to fill in their forms with the colours of the clay and the paint – the sort of “essence” of the body being literally transferred from vessel to vessel. It was only when I began to set up in the space that I decided to use the entire room rather than the area around the window, and to place the sculpture from my last performance in the centre of the room. This work was intended to act as a kind of contextual icon that referred back to the idea of a cycle: a bleached and withered mother figure giving birth to a pile of dusty bones as a depiction of simultaneous death and birthing. I decided to not practice any part of this performance. I didn’t know if the paint would try too soon, how visible the marks would be on my garment, how much of the sculptures would be left intact, how long it would take, whether the audience would be implicated or not, or how I would myself be acting in the moment. I wanted every aspect to be automatic and unpredictable, knowing how it would begin but now how it would end. This to me added a further sense of desperation and an organically raw physicality.

Certain things that I hadn’t considered came about during the performance. Firstly the paint leaked from small cracks in the porous unfired clay, leaving puddles on the canvases beneath the pieces. This liquid also soaked into both the clay and the garment much more than I thought it would, meaning it didn’t go as far or lend itself to big gestural mark-making. The wet, slippery clay however was really great to work with in my hands and was able to itself be painted onto the fabric. My audience fully entered my performance space and wandered about it at their own paces as I continued my actions, either following me or looking closer at the other objects. I hadn’t really considered how immersive this piece had the potential to be, so this was very interesting to me. It was brought up that within a typical gallery space the audience would probably stay back, but that this immersive-ness added another layer to the work. As this was a group tutorial there was a lot of talking about the work, and everyone agreed that the performance would have more impact in silence, with the only sounds being those made by my actions. Sound is definitely an important consideration to me so I agree with this, and would have had the group speak after the performance was complete if I had much more time. It was also interesting listening to the group slowly understand the workings of the performance as they took the time to notice and contrast certain aspects: the clay pieces being like artefacts, the liquid coming from the inside, the linework on my garment being figures and these figures being deliberately filled in. I could sense a feeling of slight mystery in the way they observed my actions as the performance began to unfold. A narrative was definitely picked up on, and the sculpture in the centre of the space helped expand this contextually. The sculpture was read as something I was actually performing to, either as some kind of sacrificial offering or as a prior iteration of my “character” – a kind of previous life or ancestor. The latter reading was fascinating to me, and it felt like a huge success in breaking ground between my intentions and the viewer’s understanding of my work. In terms of this character, I was seen as not being at all myself but filling a theatrical role – this was aided by my complete silence and masked appearance, recalling old East Asian and European theatre traditions. It was suggested that I extend this idea further by fully obscuring my face with no sign of my real identity. I was considered sad or solemn as I carried out the performance, and my other body language was noticed too – a violence in the destruction of the clay, but a deliberate delicacy in the soft touches and caresses of my hands around the broken pieces. The emotional resonance embodied in my physicality itself was another success of this presentation (Anqi actually came up to me after the presentation and told me she nearly cried as she watched me break apart the clay – this has stuck with me). While still appearing ritualistic and having a sense of ancient history and tradition, the impression seemed to be that I wasn’t referencing any one culture. Instead the aesthetic and motifs were read as quite pancultural – but with a mix of influences including the kimono silhouette of the garment an element of European figurative art. The pieces left over from this performance are now works in themselves: the painted garment, a pile of small pieces of clay partially stained red and now resembling rubble, and the canvases beneath the full sculptures that now carry the traces from leaked paint and the destruction of the objects – clay and fine dust adhered to the fabric by dry paint as an organic memory of the event. I’m planning on suspending all of the fabric works (garment and canvases) as an installation work, with the clay pieces either as a pile beneath or sorted through and displayed individually like museum relics. The performance now is only the origin of another branch of my project, one chapter in the cyclic narrative which leads to another expansion, just as a performance and other works prior led to Obituary as one of multiple paths. The remains become the work and the body changes vessel once again. When performing again, I definitely need to consider further the implications of performing live. This includes planning how to document my work and what kind of context it needs to be performed in. I was meant to take my shoes off before getting into costume but I forgot, and by the time I was “in character” it was too late and so they became read as intentional and affected a small amount of discussion regarding ancient vs contemporary – small details like this need to be ironed out if I want my work to be as successful as possible. Working intuitively and unrehearsed however felt very organic to me and I would like to totally exaggerate this method somehow, potentially with more possibilities for automatic interaction between myself and objects/environment and fewer pre-planned prompts. The location itself could also change the reading of the work completely – it was brought up that this performance would seem almost frightening if seen outside of an art school/gallery context, and that quality of unexpectedness or more intense reaction from the viewer is very appealing to me. I also need to think about duration, as when I finished this presentation I hadn’t reached any sort of conclusion or climax. I like the idea of performing continuously as people come and go, especially in an immersive environment. My concepts and references seem to be getting through extremely well to the viewer, so now I need to focus on experimenting with presentation and impact within the live performance space.

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meravmerav · 7 years

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Beer with a Painter: Jennifer Coates (Hyperallergic)

Jennifer Samet: You grew up in a suburb of Philadelphia. I’m guessing, based on what you have told me about your background, that you didn’t actually grow up eating the mass-produced foods that have become a subject of your work.

Jennifer Coates: In 2016, I had a show, Carb Load, at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. My mother came to the opening. She was saying to everyone, “I just want you to know, I did not feed Jennifer these foods.” And it’s true! My parents prided themselves on their gourmet cooking skills. I learned to cook from my dad. My friends at school would all eat tuna fish sandwiches on white bread with the crusts cut off. They had ravioli from the can. Those foods freaked me out. And I was just not cool and got teased for everything — from playing the violin to having nice, cute lunches, like a roast beef sandwich with mustard on multigrain bread.

So, I am recapitulating my sense of being an alien as a child. “I’m wrong, everything I do is wrong. I’m different from you, and I don’t understand you.” It is a comfortable perspective, in a way.

JS: Was art-making a part of your childhood? Were there artists in your family?

JC: Drawing was my thing. I drew all the time, picture after picture of wide-eyed little girls. They were like children of the corn, recurring and repeating and multiplying. In high school, I remember being miserable and thinking, “The only thing I have control over is what is on this piece of paper.” From time to time, it’s good to tap into that original impulse — when art history and contextualizing your work can start to take over. It’s about trying to make sense of how to be a person.

Recently, I found a drawing I made for my father, when I was eight or nine years old. He had sprained his ankle, and I was trying to make him feel better. So I made this drawing of an enormous hamburger with five different patties and all kinds of condiments, and his tankard of beer. It’s like you have one idea your whole life, and that’s it.

My maternal grandmother was really amazing. She took art classes starting in her 50s, and then went back to school to get her BFA when she was already a grandmother. She lived in Canada, and when I visited, I slept in her studio, with stacks of paintings. I saw her thesis show when I was in high school. She had learned how to cast in bronze, she made jewelry, and she made these ambitious paintings that were embedded with her experience of being a Jewish immigrant. She was a difficult person, but always very interested in what I was up to. It meant a lot to me.

JS: There’s something you told me a few years ago in your studio that I always think about. You said you grew up with an atheist Jewish mother and that experimenting with spirituality felt like the most forbidden thing. It was very funny. I’ve been thinking about it, since I know you explore relationships between the Occult and modernist art. You also consider your work to have a devotional, iconic quality.

JC: Yes, when I was an undergraduate at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, a friend of mine was involved in a born-again Christian community. Sometimes I went to church with her. I didn’t know if I believed all of it, and I wasn’t necessarily attracted to organized religion. But there was something so ecstatic, which was attractive to me. And yes, I would worry that somehow my mother was going to discover me saying, “Praise Jesus!”

I liked how the ecstatic reorients you to the moment you are in, and wakes you up. My mother saying, “God doesn’t exist… and tell your friends,” just didn’t do it for me. I think anything that makes you feel liberated, in terms of how you see reality, is a good thing. A whole world opens up when we really look at all the things that we put on our bodies, and put in ourselves. I’d rather have that be magical than neutral.

JS: At that time, when I visited your studio, you were making abstract paintings with a lot of pattern and tessellation. When and how did you move into the food-based paintings?

JC: Around the time you visited, I was probably working on “Picnic” (2014). It was a skeletal black warping grid with stuff oozing out of it. I was frustrated with it and didn’t want to be in this nebulous architectural abstraction anymore.

For a few months, I was background processing, trying to figure out where I wanted to go with the work. I had a couple of experiences that affected me. I visited Nicole Eisenman’s studio. She has known my work for a long time. I saw the painting “Under the Table 2” (2014) in the studio, which shows a huge cutaway of salami, and people hanging around the table. There are flecks of fat and meat in it. I was amazed by the painting, and Nicole said, “You could have painted those dots in the meat.” I thought, “Wow. What would it be like, to go from what I’ve been doing, to painting salami?”

Then I came across an image of a Claes Oldenburg sculpture, “Cash Register” (1961). I thought about how it was completely of its moment, but it also looks like it was dug out of the earth. It was like an ancient sculpture.

I also saw photographs of a friend’s vacation in Iceland. There were beautiful, primeval landscapes, and images of him and his wife, sitting at picnic tables, eating little snacks. Little by little, something started to cement in my head, where I thought, “I can talk about the sublime – this radiant, transcendent presence that I’m trying to coax out of paint, and also anchor it back to the everyday.”

I decided it would be really exciting to go back into the black grid with a gingham pattern. It didn’t change anything about how I was painting. But I named it, and made it specific, so that anyone looking at the painting would read it as a picnic blanket or tablecloth. On this particular surface, everything that happened on it or erupted from it felt food-oriented. A stain wasn’t just a painterly stain; it was a barf stain or something that spilled over. That was the beginning of the food.

JS: It seems that your concern in these paintings is to establish an equivalence between the paint and the food substance. Is that accurate?

JC: Paint can do what it wants to do, and the references can be multiple and diffuse. If I am doing a spray of paint, it is icing as well as a Jackson Pollock move. The food often just stages an opportunity. Is it going to be a Pointillist business, or a zip down the middle, or Abstract Expressionism? It became a way to have a lot more fun.

You also begin to think about all the weird decisions that go into preparing foods. There are aesthetic decisions that are not just about nourishment. You want things to look a certain way, or have a certain ratio of liquid to solid. That struck me as exciting to explore.

When you are spreading something on a piece of bread with a knife, you put it on in a special way. Some kids like more peanut butter, and some like more jelly. There are always aesthetic decisions. And I thought, “Well, that’s funny. Maybe making a peanut butter and jelly sandwich is a painting indoctrination experience.”

JS: I wonder why, if you are in search of the spiritual, your subject was mass-produced food. Aren’t they kind of polar opposites?

JC: Embedded in it is a critique. These processed foods are toxic — for us and for the planet. If you buy a Danish, you get a plastic-encased thing. You open it up, and the thing inside has more in common with the packaging than it does with something from your grandmother’s kitchen. How did this food become what it is? It is now made from synthetic chemicals, but why is it the shape it is? The Danish is a spiral — an ancient shape. So, for me, it’s a way to meditate on both the mysterious and toxic nature of processed food.

JS: What kinds of discoveries have you made as far as relating food shapes to symbols and forms?

JC: They are theories more than discoveries. I am sort of a conspiracy theorist-type person. I love this idea of, “Guess what?! This thing that you are so used to and never consider is actually the bearer of ancient ritual religious behavior.” I love making up stories about where things came from and finding deep-time precursors — shape rhymes throughout history.

It is interesting that as human beings we’ve been attracted to certain kinds of forms and shapes and behaviors. We tend to say, “It’s just decorative,” but what if there is something in our anatomy that draws us to similar patterns?

Lately, in lectures on my work, I am making connections between pasta shapes and entoptic forms. Entopic phenomena are the result of your visual cortex seeing your neuroanatomy. Experiments, like the ones that Heinrich Klüver did in the 1920s, have shown that people under the influence of certain hallucinogens draw specific patterns and shapes. The shapes are categorized and called “Klüver forms.” Similar kinds of forms and shapes can be found in petroglyphs and early Paleolithic art.

When I was doing excavation into the bagel shape, I saw images of yoni carved stone forms found in Israel eight thousand years ago. They are thought to conform to fertility or female genitalia worship. They were circular shapes with a hole in the center and a slit down the middle. For me, that’s all I need. You get a bagel, but it’s a bearer of this ancient ritual, affiliated with matriarchy and female shamans.

JS: So when you say they are theories, you’re not necessarily tying to prove them? I know you are interested in the work of Terence McKenna, the ethnobotanist and mystic. How did his work influence you?

JC: When I come up with a theory, it’s not verbal — it is visual. I lay out the pictures.

I want to trust the visual part of my brain — the part that is intuitive, and has shape recognition and pattern recognition. I’m trying to prove my theory through images. My hope is that if you are allowing yourself to think purely visually, you can be very thorough and engaged with what’s around you.

I got into Terence McKenna through the painter Steve DiBenedetto. His lectures are archived online, and I have listened to them constantly in my studio for years. McKenna changed my way of thinking. The desire to dig into history, improvise, and make up a story came from him. McKenna read everything, but he plays with all of the information and ideas. He’s not beholden to any of it. He wasn’t a scholar or a scientist. He just says, “Here’s what I think.”

JS: It seems as if you make a lot of painting jokes in your work. The sprinkles or dots can be abstract ellipses. Are you interested in Pattern and Decoration artists, or Op Art? Who are the figures in art history you are talking to the most?

JC: There are a lot of painting jokes. There are all kinds of moments where I think I can pretend to be this or that artist. It is very satisfying. With the bread and the popsicle paintings, I think about Rothko and Color Field painting. How can the popsicle be radiant? I’m thinking about a color relationship where the paint isn’t just naming something, but also transcending itself.

As for Pattern painters, I’ve always liked James Siena’s work a lot. I like Bridget Riley, but I would want to pee on it. I always want to do something to mess with Op Art.

Turner is somebody I come back to over and over and over again. The moments of light in his paintings are the most impressive and the most physical, but they are also the most ethereal — barely there. It is abject light and also transformative. I love that you can have something be really mucky and crusty, and also a ghost.

Hopefully, what comes across in my work is a kind of heightened devotional object that has a radiant presence. I was thinking about sacrificial stone altars. The slab, where an animal is getting killed with a knife, is like the first abstract expressionist painting. So making a sandwich and spreading substances around with a knife is like a weird descendent of the sacrifice. Peanut butter and jelly can look like bodily fluids or innards. It is gooey business.

JS: Do you see your paintings as feminist in the sense that they are acknowledging this kind of messiness? It is what Mira Schor talks about in “Figure/Ground” (1989), which is an essay you have cited as an influence.

JC: When I was an undergraduate, I was obsessed with Kiki Smith and body art. It was the early 1990s — that moment when body art was prominent. I took a feminist art history class at the University of Pennsylvania. I came from the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, where you draw from life and study anatomy. That art history class showed there was a way to use the body to communicate a political, feminist message. That concern with how the body is fragile, and breaks down, and there is pee and blood — I was really into that. And that interest has never left me.

So for me, paint is very bodily. As much as it sort of organizes itself to be a depiction of something, it’s also always restating itself as this amorphous pile of goo. What’s a more amorphous pile of goo than the innards or a decaying corpse? I was trying to paint a sandwich, but then I said, “It is a fucking bloody vagina.” That’s what it is. I want it to look like that. If someone sees something that’s embarrassing and kind of weird, a stain that’s wrong, then I feel good.

I’m really excited about those moments where it becomes unruly and messy, anti-logic or anti-gravity. In his book The Swerve, Stephen Greenblatt discusses ancient Greek and Roman atomistic theory. The idea was that tiny particles shower down in the cosmos, moving in parallel lines. Every now and then, one goes out of its path. That is when things interact. It is that interruption of the pattern, and that interaction, which causes things to happen. Evolution happens. Systems self-exceed. Things progress when there is a mistake. So, I prefer the mistake.

The thing that makes many artists interesting is how they re-tool the past. They confuse our relationship to what we thought was familiar. You have to trust that part of your brain — the part that goes, This, on top of that. Something erupts from the matrix and the orderly. Then, all of a sudden, everything is exciting.

#jennifercoates hyperallergic interview

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