SOJOURNER TRUTH PARSONS

Parsons’s new paintings act as indices for moments of intensity and intimacy. Through her use of rich, vibratory tones, the artist locates and extracts fleeting details from our quietest moments: the subtle interactions of light, the flickering of memory and thought.

The artist’s new body of work has emerged in symbiosis with the growth of her garden and the changing of the seasons. The paintings were created partly in response to Louise Glück’s poetry, where the garden is often employed as an allegorical space within which life, in all of its profound and prosaic registers, is tended and nurtured. The garden’s cycle – the tedium of dormancy, the miracle of resurrection, rampant growth turning into grief – comes to stand for hard-to-grasp states of mind.

Parsons responds to these logics of frenetic expansion and wildness, using desire as a guiding principle. Intense emotions become anchored to the objects observed in her everyday routine, from the lily pads in her garden, to the patch of light that faithfully appears each day in her bedroom. Walking through her garden and a nearby forest allows the artist to observe how colours and refractions of light move across a visual scale, and the chromatic nuance as twilight turns to darkness. Parsons’s paintings always begin in darkness and are then layered with iridescent light and matte shades, producing a tenebrosity that covers and disguises form. Flashes of saturated colour, flattened space and familiar motifs converge, fraying the border between interior and exterior worlds. The tableaux of silhouettes that emerge play with our sense of space: recognisable objects come forward or recede into darkness; narrative is held in stasis, creating moments of feeling rather than recognition.

Sojourner Truth Parsons (b. 1984, Vancouver, Canada) lives and works between the southern Catskill mountains and Brooklyn, NY. Recent solo exhibitions include: If nobody wants you you’re free, Esther Schipper, Berlin (2023); My name is not susan., Foxy Production, New York (2022); Holding Your Dog At Night, Oakville Galleries, Oakville (2017). Recent group exhibitions include: Downbeat, Marian Goodman Gallery, New York (2023); The New Bend, curated by Legacy Russell, Hauser & Wirth, New York (2022); L’Invitation au voyage, Esther Schipper, Berlin (2021), and This is America, Kunstraum Potsdam, Potsdam (2021). Parsons’s work is included in the collections of Museum Voorlinden, Wassenar; The Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, Montreal; Oakville Galleries, Oakville; Portland Museum of Art, Portland; and Long Museum, Shanghai, among others.