Featured Artist | Angie Quintanilla Coates | Hope For Everything

In Hope for Everything, Angie Quintanilla Coates integrates wooden shapes that for previous projects posed too many obstacles. Although these reclaimed pieces hadn’t easily cooperated with her earlier work, their strangeness interested her, so she kept them to the side, wondering if they would ever find a way into her art.

For Quintanilla Coates, the past year involved several personal and professional transitions. While these experiences were not negative, they were challenging, and they required her to accept limitations on what she could control, and to learn to adapt to what she could not. The pieces in Hope for Everything mirror her process of finding equilibrium during a period of change and uncertainty.

Like the difficult experiences she faced outside her studio, the strangely shaped reclaimed wood in Hope for Everything refused easy integration. Quintanilla Coates had to work with their incongruous forms, softening the edges, painting with bold, saturated colours, and using layers to bring an illusion of depth. She balanced working on these pieces with periodic returns to her traditional wood reliefs, finding in them a reprieve from the struggle of managing obstinate objects. Although her reliefs are complex structures, working with them felt familiar this time, a process that came with the kind of intuitive control learned from years of practice. Working with the reclaimed wooden objects, however, presented an entirely different artistic encounter. Just as her own life required her to face the realities of her circumstances, the process of working with the reclaimed wood insisted that she acknowledge her powerlessness, and invited her to reframe those limitations as opportunities for new design. In this way, Hope for Everything reflects a process of acceptance and adaptation—an act of facing an unchangeable situation and, rather than turning away in fear or uncertainty, meeting the moment with curiosity and a willingness to grow.