DIMIN is pleased to present My Alchemical Vessel, a new series of paintings by Emily Coan, marking a significant shift in the artist’s practice. Moving away from the female figures and Hudson Valley landscapes that have defined her recent work, Coan turns inward, depicting the interiors of her in-laws’ 18th-century farmhouse in Ghent, New York. Built around the time of the American Revolution, the farmhouse becomes both setting and subject: a repository of family history, a site of inheritance, and a space through which the artist considers the experience of entering midlife as a woman.
Rather than constructing imagined environments for her figures, Coan begins with a specific, lived space and allows its history to shape the paintings. In these intimate domestic vignettes, the home becomes a microcosm through which she considers the tension between inherent expectations and the possibility of constructing a new identity. The domestic interior, traditionally associated with feminine labor and stability, is understood here as a space that can simultaneously provide security and impose limitations. As Coan depicts an environment she will one day occupy, she reflects on what it means to inherit not only a physical structure, but also the histories, obligations, and identities it contains.
Coan’s multilayered oil paintings retain her sensitivity to atmosphere, light, and the psychological possibilities of space, while introducing a quieter and more intimate visual language. Her interest in European genre painting is evident in a recollection classical tradition, with dramatic chiaroscuro, deep shadows, and the warm glow of candlelight. References to Vermeer, Georges de La Tour, and Jan van Eyck are apparent in the way light transforms ordinary interiors into spaces of heightened psychological and spiritual significance. Yet within these traditional compositions, Coan embeds personal and distinctly contemporary details: an empty Doritos bag, a box of tarot cards, an iPhone. These objects appear almost casually within the scenes, their familiarity contrasting with the paintings’ historical atmosphere. In plain sight, they introduce traces of Coan’s own life and the present moment, subtly disrupting the sense that these rooms exist outside ordinary time. The resulting imagery occupies a space between past and present, where the domestic environment becomes both a psychological landscape and a record of contemporary life.
The title, My Alchemical Vessel, draws on the language of alchemy, imagining the farmhouse itself as a vessel undergoing “nigredo”, the first stage in the creation of the Philosopher’s Stone. Drawing on Marie-Louise von Franz’s writing on alchemy, Coan contemplates nigredo as a necessary stage of transformation, in which the existing self undergoes darkness, decomposition, and dissolution before something new can emerge. Von Franz translated the religious concept of the “dark night of the soul” (originally coined by 16th-century mystic St. John of the Cross) into the language of depth psychology and alchemy. For Coan, this phrase becomes a metaphor for midlife and the unstable passage between identities. The house is at once container, crucible, and witness, holding generations of history while becoming the site of Coan’s own transformation.
As in Coan’s earlier work, the subjects are drawn from her friends and family, each embodying different aspects of the artist’s own experience. Coan appears only once herself, in the large work Nigredo, yet there is a strong personal parallel to the characters of Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women. In Meg, as she embraces domestic happiness and traditional love; in Amy, as she pursues artistic refinement and maturity; and even in Laurie, whose search for belonging echoes Coan’s own experience of finding her place within her in-laws’ family and home. Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude provides another literary point of reference, particularly in its treatment of family, inheritance, memory, and the cyclical nature of time. Together, these influences deepen Coan’s exploration of the home as a space where generations overlap and personal histories overlap, and identity is shaped by what has been passed down.
My Alchemical Vessel marks a new chapter in Coan’s ongoing investigation of femininity, power, and transformation. Where her earlier paintings placed female figures within fantastical landscapes, these works locate transformation inside the walls of a home. The movement from the imagined to the all-too real, brings the psychological and symbolic concerns of her earlier work into a deeply personal environment. Citing anxieties about disappearing as a woman under the pressures of midlife, Coan grapples with how to “become something powerfully new when pressure from all sides threatens to burn you up”. The paintings hold this tension between dissolution and emergence, asking what might remain when an inherited identity can no longer contain the person becoming it. In this sense, the farmhouse is not simply a backdrop for transformation, but the place where Coan confronts the possibility of being remade by the very forces that threaten to consume her.
Image by Blossom Berkofsky
Verdant Light (444), 2025, oil on linen, 65 × 78 in
detail, Verdant Light (444), 2025, oil on linen, 65 × 78 in (
Installation View, The Armory Show with DIMIN, 2025
Ascending, 75 × 60in, oil on linen, 2025
detail, Ascending, 75 × 60in, oil on linen, 2025
Inanna’s Gate, 2025, oil on linen, 56 × 70i in
The Spring (Green), 2025, Oil on linen, 24 x 18 in (61 x 45.7 cm)
Midnight Boaters, 2025, Oil on linen, 36 x 48 in (91.4 x 121.9 cm)
Vermillion Landscape 2, Oil on linen, 20 x 24 in (50.8 x 61 cm)
Human Spider, 2025, Oil on linen, 18 x 24 in (45.7 x 61 cm)
Datura, 2025, Oil on linen, 30 x 40 in (76.2 x 101.6 cm)
Our Lady (Green), 2025, Oil on linen, 16 x 20 in (40.6 x 50.8 cm)
Eight-Legged Ritual, 50×60in, oil on linen 2024
The Spring, 2024, Oil on linen, 70 x 56 in, 177.8 x 142.2 cm
Installation View, Spider Silk at DIMIN
Gathering Webs for Spider Silk, 2024, Oil on linen, 60 x 80 in, 152.4 x 203.2 cm
Installation View, Spider Silk at DIMIN
Our Lady, 2024, Oil on linen, 60 x 72 in, 152.4 x 182.9 cm
Installation View, Spider Silk at DIMIN
Study for On the Outskirts of the Forest, 2024, Oil on panel, 12 x 16 in
Mother
50x60in
oil on linen
2023
Vice Grip
36x48in
oil on canvas
2023
En Caul (Pietà)
40x32in
oil on linen
2023
Wash Day
30x40
Oil on linen
2022
Burnout
24x20”
oil on linen
2023
Waning Gibbous, Early Spring - Ring of Fire
36x48”
Oil on canvas
2022
Last Quarter, Early Spring - Cutting, Clearing
40x30”
Oil on canvas
2022
Waning Crescent, Spring - Sympathetic Magic
16x12”
Oil on panel
2022
New Moon, Late Spring - Flaxen
24x30”
Oil on linen
2022
Full Moon, Late Summer - Feast
60x48”
Oil on canvas
2022
Requiem
30x40in
oil on canvas
2021
En Caul
10x8in
oil on panel
2021
Eden (Small)
16x20in
oil on panel
2021
8 Cups
30x40in
oil on canvas
2021
Ophelia, Resurrected
48x36in
oil on canvas
2021
Weeping Room
20x16in
oil on panel
2021
Envy in the Wings
26x34in
oil on canvas
2021
Candle Girl
24x18in
oil on canvas
2021
Bridesmaids
34x26in
oil on canvas
2021
Columbine
10x8in
oil on panel
2021
Wisteria Girls, 24x18in, oil on canvas, 2020
Berkshire Girls, 18x12in, oil on canvas, 2020
The Space Beneath the Rose Garden 2, 20x16in, oil on canvas, 2020
Chamber of Mirrors
40x30in
oil on canvas
2020
The Moon
30x40in
oil on canvas
2019
Mother
60x48in
oil on canvas
2019
The Space Beneath the Rose Garden
40x30in
oil on canvas
2019
Debutantes
48x36in
oil on canvas
2019
Yin Embodied
66 x 37” 2018
oil on canvas