“Louise” — Sojourner Truth Parsons

The title of Sojourner Truth Parsons's exhibition nods to the poet Louise Glück with a strange, unguarded familiarity, as if the show were already on a first-name basis. The title makes you wonder whether Glück's poetry is meant to illuminate Parsons's paintings, or whether the relation remains more fugitive and opaque. I feel like it's something closer to the latter, a secret held in a very particular way, the painter's private relation to the poet, an idea that hangs in the room, the kind of thing that resists full articulation. When confronted with an elusive relation like this one, there's the temptation to start trawling through Glück's poetry in search of a passage or line, some interpretative key to help guide our encounter, as if meaning were a matter of proper cross-referencing. But that doesn't seem to be the point. Maybe the secret should remain a secret. I find myself drawn to that possibility that Parsons's work refuses the impulse to explain her work away by citing a line of poetry, refuses any neat literary correspondence between painting and poetry, insisting that if a relationship exists at all, it is an obscure and obstinate one.