How Dark My Love Review: Two hearts burning as one
2025
Anti-Monitor
by Jarrod Jones
“HowDarkMyLove, Scott Gracheff’s tender and absorbing documentary, doesn’t so much profile Coleman as it basks in his brilliance, capturing his compulsions, his craft, and, crucially, his ecstatic devotion to Whitney Ward: dominatrix, photographer, muse, and wife. His film grants us, with remarkable generosity, a guest pass into Coleman’s Odditorium, a singular space of sinister artifacts, horror-fetish bric-a-brac, infant cadavers in jars, and at its flaming center, the most recent example of Coleman’s devotion: “Doorway to Whitney.”….
“Coleman’s larger pursuit as an artist — and maybe this is the reason his work holds such perverse magnetism — is that he seeks out the soul in the detritus, stitching together a riotous patchwork of anecdotes, obscenities, and visual static to reveal some untold humanity on the canvas. His subjects stand there, Clowesian Eightball figures simmering with lysergic fury, as the artist attempts to summarize the unquantifiable, to make sense of the monsters and maestros who make the largest waves in this chaotic sea of ours.”
