In the quiet yet charged space of Long Story Short Paris, something is ending. Something is beginning. With her newest exhibition, Nightshades, Emily Coan draws a line in the sand—delicate, deliberate, and softly final. Known for paintings that feel like reverent dreams, Coan has always flirted with transformation. But in Nightshades, she leans in fully, wrapping the viewer in a dusk-hued tapestry that marks the closing of a chapter.

Coan has long worked at the intersection of personal myth and collective memory. Her “Spider Silk” series, of which Nightshades is a culminating point, has tracked a group of archetypal sisters—spiritual, fierce, and feminine—as they navigate realms stitched together by story, season, and self. In Nightshades, those sisters move into the dark.

“The work is over. After toiling by day to weave garments made of spider silk, the sisters wait in anticipation of their somnambulate journey.”

This is how Coan describes the moment. A stillness that contains movement. Rest that is not passive, but preparatory. The show’s paintings hold this tension intimately, each one vibrating with the energy of something almost mythic.

The Language of Color: Phthalos, Viridian, Vermilion

Nightshades opens like a nocturne, the palette intentionally moody. Gone are the ochres and sun-warmed clays of earlier works. In their place: rich, jewel-toned phthalos, stormy viridians, flashes of vermilion like blood pricked from a rose. There’s a shift, not just visually, but emotionally. These paintings do not ask to be admired from afar—they ask to be entered. To be wandered through, like a dark forest at the edge of a dream.

Color is more than mood in Coan’s work. It’s narrative. It’s character. The phthalo blues evoke water and depth, a sense of crossing. The viridians suggest growth—but growth in shadow, unseen and mysterious. And vermilion, fiery and pulsing, becomes a thread that runs through each canvas: a signal, a wound, a flame that won’t go out.

These are not random choices. They are intentional echoes of the sisters’ journey—a palette of rites, of retreat, of renewal.

From Sunlight to Shade: A Shift in Perspective

If the earlier works in the “Spider Silk” series captured the vitality of daytime—creation, connection, collaboration—then Nightshades is its counterpoint. Not a negation, but a necessary progression.

In the lore Coan has carefully cultivated over the years, the sisters are not just characters. They are stand-ins for womanhood, for generational labor, for the stories we inherit and the ones we choose to write. In daylight, they wove. They touched soil. They danced and bled and planted. But now, in the night, they become something else—silent witnesses, dreamers, mythmakers. They are no longer shaping the world with their hands. They are becoming part of it.

There’s power in this retreat. In choosing darkness not as absence, but as fertile unknown. The night in Nightshades isn’t a void—it’s a sanctuary. A pause. A space where transformation becomes possible.

A Practice Rooted in Ritual and Archetype

Coan’s painting has always been deeply spiritual—not in the dogmatic sense, but in the way of ritual. Of knowing. Her works are layered with symbols that feel half-remembered: vessels, flora, cloaks, talismans. In Nightshades, the iconography remains, but it feels quieter. More interior. The women in these paintings are no longer facing the viewer head-on. They are turned slightly away, mid-movement, half-invisible.

They’re not disappearing. They’re retreating.

Throughout the exhibit, one recurring element stands out: the shrouds. Cloaks or robes, spun in the daylight, now worn as armor or comfort. They are intricate, beautiful, and loaded with significance. These garments—rendered in painstaking brushwork—are not decorative. They are protective. The result of labor, love, and lineage. The viewer can almost feel their texture: light as silk, strong as memory.

The shrouds become a metaphor for all the invisible work that holds us. Emotional. Maternal. Ancestral. They speak to what we inherit, and what we carry forward.

Paris as Portal: Why Long Story Short Matters

That Nightshades debuts in Paris is not incidental. Long Story Short is a gallery known for its support of artists pushing narrative boundaries, especially those working at the edge of identity, materiality, and myth. Its intimate setting—a converted atelier nestled in the Marais—feels like part of the work.

Viewers don’t just walk through Nightshades; they are immersed in it. The walls pulse with shadow. The light is low, deliberate. In one corner, a textile installation mirrors the painted garments, spun of thread and dust and dream. In another, a low table holds notebooks with Coan’s preliminary sketches, annotated with fragments of poetry and ritual.

This is not just an exhibition—it’s a space of transition. For Coan, and for us.

An Artist at a Threshold

Coan has described Nightshades as a kind of closure, though she resists the word “ending.” After years of working on the “Spider Silk” cycle, she is stepping away from it. Not with finality, but with reverence. The way one might close the cover of a well-worn book and place it on a shelf.

There’s a vulnerability in that choice. A kind of honesty that isn’t common in contemporary art circles, where ongoingness often equates to relevance. But Coan is not interested in chasing relevance. Her work has always followed a deeper rhythm—seasonal, internal, lunar.

To walk through Nightshades is to walk with an artist who knows herself. Who trusts the arc of her own story. Who isn’t afraid to say, “This part is done. Now comes the dark. And after that, something new.”

Night, Not as End—But as Invitation

There’s a temptation to read Nightshades as elegy. And in some ways, it is. A goodbye to a cycle of work. A farewell to daylight. But it’s also a celebration. Of dusk. Of rest. Of the rich, ambiguous space between what was and what will be.

It’s also, notably, a celebration of women’s narratives—ones that often go unheard, or unseen, or unspoken. Coan’s sisters are not loud. They don’t fight for the spotlight. They work. They love. They weave. And then, they walk into the night with their heads high, their garments glowing.

There is radical dignity in that choice. In choosing rest. Choosing stillness. Choosing not to perform, but simply to be.

Flow

With Nightshades, Emily Coan doesn’t just show us an end—she gives us permission to embrace one. She offers an image of closure that is beautiful, earned, and open-ended.

The final painting in the show is small—almost miniature compared to the rest. In it, a single figure stands at the edge of a lake, the surface of the water mirroring a starless sky. She is neither walking in nor turning back. She is simply there. Holding space. Holding time.

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