Sojourner Truth Parsons

For more than ten years now, the paintings of Sojourner Truth Parsons have trafficked in the saturated and sensorial. Plumbing the space between abstraction and legibility, feeling and form, the language of Parsons’ work is an intuitive one. Building depth through accretion, collapsing interior and exterior realms, and traversing a shifting set of references — from the history of dance to the Gee’s Bend quilts of Alabama to her garden in the Catskill Mountains — her paintings give shape to intensities both atmospheric and embodied.

Louise brings together a selection of works produced by the Vancouver-born, New York-based artist over the past several years, surveying the dexterity of her movement between figuration and form and her canvases’ elemental approach to sensation, texture and tone. Titled after the work of poet Louise Glück — known for her decades-long meditation on the illusions and agonies of the self — the exhibition traces the enduring emotional registers, both individual and collective, that occupy Parsons’ time in the studio: desire, loss, isolation, redemption, resurgence.

Biography

Sojourner Truth Parsons (b. 1984, Vancouver) lives and works in New York and the Southern Catskill Mountains. Her recent solo exhibitions include Pilar Corrias, London; Esther Schipper, Berlin; Foxy Production, New York; Various Small Fires, Seoul; The Journal Gallery, New York; and Oakville Galleries, Canada. Recent group exhibitions include Painting Energy: The Alex Katz Painting Foundation Collection, Portland Museum of Art; The New Bend, curated by Legacy Russell, Hauser & Wirth, New York, Los Angeles & Somerset; Downbeat, Marian Goodman Gallery, New York; Springweather and people, Bortolami, New York; and This is America, Kunstraum Potsdam. Parsons was artist in residence at Denniston Hill; the Santa Fe Art Institute; The Rooms, Newfoundland; and the Ross Creek Center for the Arts, Bay of Fundy. Among other collections, her work is held by the Long Museum, Shanghai; Montreal Museum of Fine Arts; Museum Voorlinden, Wassenaar; National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa; Portland Museum of Art; Royal Bank of Canada; and the Vanhaerents Art Collection, Brussels.