Sojourner Truth Parsons New York, 2023

The vividness of everyday-life experiences but also the strangeness of existence are at the basis of Sojourner Truth Parsons’ work. With their intermingling bright colors, silhouetted bodies, and black fields doubling as architectural markers and framing devices, Parsons' paintings have an astounding atmospheric intensity. Her compositions hover at the threshold of abstraction and representation, swinging back and forth as recognizable shapes such as bodies, flowers, city blocks or landscapes never fully settle in one register or the other. Composed from overlapping elements—layers of paint alternate with thin washes, matt surfaces with slightly glossier and iridescent passages—the artist’s iconography constructs an interior environment, more psychic landscape than forest or city block, embodying emotional truth.

Urban landscape of skyscrapers, slivers of river views, and window frames entered Parsons’ work after her move to New York from Los Angeles in 2018. The new paintings are informed by her extended stays in rural Upstate New York and show the artist’s renewed engagement with nature. Sometimes the association with the outside world is anchored simply by a luminous round disc—sun or moon—that lets the painting shift between abstraction and representation at the blink of an eye.

Color in Parsons’ paintings can signal formal and emotional associations: brighter ones, such as hot pink and bright reds may refer to the unreality of artificial lights in an urban setting, a sunset framed by Manhattan’s skyline or indicate a bright summers day.

Yet, compositional structure and color have a wider significance in Parsons’ practice. As the artist noted in 2022, “I find edges really beautiful. When I’m experiencing the world, I can’t help but see everything as an edge, as a color next to a texture next to a flatness. And as a white-passing person of color, that ‘edgeness’ has been part of the way that I’ve moved through the world interpersonally, my whole life. On an edge.“