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Sojourner Truth Parsons The end, 2020
Acrylic on canvas
60,9 x 50,8 cm
The work is from a series painted in 2019-2020 in the context of Sojourner Truth Parsons’s solo exhibition ‘Sex and love with a psychologist’ in New York.
As the writer Kim-Anh Schreiber wrote in the accompanying text about the works: “melodrama and melancholy are always center stage, always cinematic, and always broken: broken blinds, broken faces, broken flowers. If to enter this exhibition is to enter the interior landscape of a heart that’s broken, its eau de vie is the glittering tear. Sliced-up imagery reveals the tactile joy of art-making, where paint breaks the canvas into frames within frames, which become windows, or mirrors, or screens, or city lights, or printed-out photos affixed to the wall in tape. As if lifted from the visual language of a ‘90s power ballad, eyes cry in a sliver of light or contemplate a hunger as operatic as the New York they’re painted in. One could easily imagine the bodies depicted as fractured doubles splitting off the self of an artist who paints in dim light with music playing, pink and red sunlight projecting silhouettes of bodies against the city’s silhouette. Even when gazing out the window, in a mirror, or through the screen, the eye is always circled back within, is always, through watching others, watching itself. What does it look like to long through the language of a music video? Or is the question: how does it feel? ….In these images within images, a folding, arranging, and rearranging are occurring, a life-exercise in choreography that moves between the paintings and the space the artist inhabits—a movement that is a way of thinking. I imagine that between the life claw and the canvas there is an energy pulsing that can short circuit the flow of melodrama and melancholic desire so sparks can fly. I imagine that in this moment the mask and silhouette will match the self staged in the imagination, so that interior and exterior find their lock step in the ecstasy of the corps de ballet, folding in and out of themselves like lungs, like breathing.“