Sojourner Truth Parsons Pray for Sex, 2020-2021
Acrylic on canvas
248,5 x 202,8 x 5 cm
For nearly ten years now, the paintings of Sojourner Truth Parsons have trafficked in the saturated and sensorial. Known for canvases that are as lucid as they are fragmentary, potent as they are unfixed, at the heart of Parsons’ practice is a concern with the psychic life of the everyday, delineating the feelings, forms and fantasies that structure our worlds.
Bodies, flora and fauna, the city around her, these forms recur across the Vancouver-born, New York-based artist’s work, indexes for the emotional acuities and atmospheric intensities that occupy her time in the studio. Whether rendering the dark heat of desire or the vacuous pull of despair, Parsons’ works dispense with distinctions between interior and exterior realms, nudging us instead toward a lexicon of the energetic and affective.
The received idea will always exceed the frame of reality, Parsons reminds us--the fantasy by its very nature fallible in form. A woman stares wistfully out a window in Pray for sex, the city reflected back at her as a goddess candle burns on offer below. It’s uncommon for Parsons to render faces in her work, even rarer with the level of detail on offer here. When she does, however, these faces are nearly always white--parodically, blue-bloodedly white--a mordant nod to the ways love and fantasy are imaged and internalized culturally, with Parsons pointedly reminding us to whom the province of illusion so often belongs. In just a few strokes, Parsons makes plain to us that the look on this woman’s face is not one of longing, but rather of expectation--unthinking, unfulfilled, unshakable, devastating.
– Matthew Hyland
Bodies, flora and fauna, the city around her, these forms recur across the Vancouver-born, New York-based artist’s work, indexes for the emotional acuities and atmospheric intensities that occupy her time in the studio. Whether rendering the dark heat of desire or the vacuous pull of despair, Parsons’ works dispense with distinctions between interior and exterior realms, nudging us instead toward a lexicon of the energetic and affective.
The received idea will always exceed the frame of reality, Parsons reminds us--the fantasy by its very nature fallible in form. A woman stares wistfully out a window in Pray for sex, the city reflected back at her as a goddess candle burns on offer below. It’s uncommon for Parsons to render faces in her work, even rarer with the level of detail on offer here. When she does, however, these faces are nearly always white--parodically, blue-bloodedly white--a mordant nod to the ways love and fantasy are imaged and internalized culturally, with Parsons pointedly reminding us to whom the province of illusion so often belongs. In just a few strokes, Parsons makes plain to us that the look on this woman’s face is not one of longing, but rather of expectation--unthinking, unfulfilled, unshakable, devastating.
– Matthew Hyland
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