Transfigurations

Commissioned by the University of New Mexico Art Museum for the exhibition HINDSIGHT / INSIGHT: Reflecting on the Collection, Transfigurations responds to a group of modernist artists with deep ties to UNM and New Mexico, including Rebecca Salsbury James, Raymond Jonson, Georgia O'Keeffe, Agnes Pelton, Florence Miller Pierce, and Horace Towner Pierce.

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The piece centers most closely on Raymond Jonson (1891–1982), a pioneer of nonrepresentational painting who led the Transcendental Painting Group and taught for decades at UNM, whose art museum now holds the largest collection of his work in the world. Jonson drew heavily on music, particularly the work of Schoenberg and Prokofiev, translating concepts like rhythm and dissonance into visual form in pursuit of spiritual and kinesthetic experience. Transfigurations (a title signifying change toward a more spiritual state) pays homage to Jonson by tracing the throughlines between his ideas and Coons's own, while also foregrounding points of contemporary "dissonance" between them.

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The piece unfolds in three sections, each built around one of the color types Jonson proposed could elicit distinct imaginative responses in a viewer. "Walking Rain" draws on the "tonal": grayscale, foundational, rhythmic and visceral. "The Golden Hour" reflects the "brilliant": light, effortless. "A Light Never Seen" takes up the "dissonant," pairing modernist formalism with passages of stillness and silence that may unsettle as much as any dissonant chord. Each section's expression marking is drawn from Jonson's own writing.

Transfigurations exists both as a fixed-media electronic work, built from field recordings of New Mexico's outdoor spaces, and as a live piece for acoustic trio, placing the "earthly" sounds of the natural environment alongside the sounds of "high art" and the otherworldly quality of electronic sound.

 

For gallery installation, six recordings are made available (three electronic, three acoustic), with the curator invited to choose which to play at any given time as the exhibition's paintings rotate: a fixed work that still carries forward the collaborative, ever-shifting spirit of the "open work" that runs through Coons's music.