Sophy Naess

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What is my work about?

My work has always been a kind of wish making, a devotional work related to love and desire and celebration of things I hold dear. It is about my experience: about the sensations, emotions, and observations that affirm my sense of being in the world. Therefore it spans many subjects. It is rooted in painting as a mode of expression, striving for sociability, for conversation, for inquiry, for posing questions. It is concerned with Time as an elastic medium, a physical force, a precious commodity, a container.

 

Artist Statement

The images included here survey my paintings of the past year. While the media varies, the overarching theme I’m exploring is TIME.

My practice is firmly rooted in traditions of figurative painting. As a teenager I started painting portraits of friends from life, it is important to note. The time spent with the subject, and the unusual space for dialog that the sitting occasioned, was always the motivation for making a portrait. I continue to value this kind of social slowingdown, which feels important in a world where most of us are forced to sell our time by the hour, attention is a hot commodity, and so much experience is mediated through a screen. Although my recent exhibitions have not been portraits per se, the argument for embodied interaction which I first explored through portraiture is still fundamental in my work.

While I do hope that my paintings are able to stand alone visually, (and for purposes of concision I have presented them that way here), writing is also an important part of how I communicate. At times it feels that the philosophical space that painting provides is a means of generating text, and my recent exhibitions are always accompanied by writings, whether they be “scripts” for the paintings, “wrappers” for objects, or lists of the material & immaterial ingredients in the work.

My slides begin with the culmination of my MFA studies at Rutgers: a mural sized painting that pictured people “working.” None of the subjects are engaged in traditionally heroic activities, but all are performing in ways that I felt were of unique value in the struggle against alienated labor. The painting served as a backdrop for performances including poetry readings and dance, and I read a script which guided the audience through its imagery, making my questions about art & labor explicit.

My work since has been concerned with allegories of time, moving in a trajectory from metaphorical representation to objects that evidence the passage of time in a quite literal, sensorial manner.

An artist book of “Picture Clocks,” or templates in which real clockworks can be embedded, was a preliminary investigation into ideas about time, and the centerfold of the book of prints is included here.

Subsequent images are from an ongoing project titled “Parable of the Sower” after the Bruegel painting and the biblical notion of seeds which may or may not come to fruition depending on circumstance. The parable’s theme of contingency is extremely important to my relationship to painting. I began these paintings during a residency in rural upstate New York, where I took up the daily practice of still life painting, looking at traditional allegorical subjects like snails and flowers that I collected in the environment every morning. These subjects changed dramatically before my eyes as summer turned to autumn, which was a kind of revelation for me.

My most recent work has placed these subjects in direct relationship with the embodied viewer: I have been using SOAP as a material. Glycerin is a medium of suspension, and it is a fragrant invitation to bodily contact. It washes away as we rub it against our bodies in rituals of cleansing, changing shape and gradually disappearing, reminding ultimately of the fleeting nature of our own physicality. It is a literal vanitas, a functional “memento mori.” I work with it in much the same way as I use traditional paints, using cosmetic pigments and organic materials as colorants so that in theory it is always “body safe.” Fragrance oils are also a palette I work with in composing each piece.

Dieter Roth’s instruction to “ALWAYS ENDEAVOR TO FIND SOME INTERESTING VARIATION” is somewhat of a mantra for me. Thus, while soap has proven to be an exciting medium for me this year, I see it as a point on a map of explorations of temporality and bodily experience. Other forms are yet to be explored. One that I am particularly interested in is tapestry weaving. I have inherited a loom from my grandmother and will soon begin learning to “paint” new worlds on its threads.

 

CV

Education

2011-2013 M.FA. Mason Gross School of the Arts, Rutgers, New Brunswick NJ

2013 Ancient Evenings Writing Workshop with Ariana Reines, NYC

2000-2004 B.F.A. The Cooper Union, School of Art, New York

2002 Slade School of Fine Art, London

 

Solo Exhibitions

2013

Furtive Movements, Weekend Projects, Brooklyn, NY (artist run project space)

2011

Unexpected Pasts and Frantic Futures, Galleri Box, Gothenburg, SE

2009

Galleri Thomassen, The Fairest of Them All, Gothenburg, SE

2008

Galleri 54, Like to Get to Know You Well, Gothenburg, SE

2006

The Railton Collection, New York, NY

 

Selected Group Exhibitions & Readings

2014

Zero Point, Jackie Klempay Gallery, Brooklyn NY

The View from the Window, curated by Lumi Tan, Chapter NY, NYC

Yard Show, Essex Flowers, NYC

Speaking Through Paint: Hans Hofmann’s Legacy Today, Lori Bookstein Fine Art, NYC

Bureau of General Services Queer Division DICTIONARY reading series

Devil’s Dust (reading) Southfirst Gallery, Brooklyn

The Last Brucennial, NYC

Correspondance, Publication Studio Hudson, Catskill, NY

Tag Sale, organized by Julia Sherman, NYC

Material Memory: Heather Hart, Nick Pilato, Sophy Naess, Gallery Aferro, Newark, NJ

2013

Medium/Rare. Brooklyn Museum Staff Show

Fruit and Vegetable Stand by Paul Branca, NYC

Hands on a Hard Body, Rutgers MFA Thesis Exhibition, New Brunswick, NJ

FABRIKA (with Jam Archives), Court Square, NYC

Your Content Will Return Shortly, Franklin Street Works, CT

2012

The End(s) of the Library, Goethe Institut, NYC

Fruit and Vegetable Stand by Paul Branca, NYC

Art / Leisure, The Wassaic Project, NY

Bazaar, Soloway, Brooklyn

Little Languages Coded Pictures, Kathryn Markel Fine Arts, NYC

The Brucennial, NYC

Dependent Art Fair, with New Capital Projects, NYC

2011

99% Wizards of Change, Mason Gross Galleries, New Brunswick, NJ

A Person Of Color / A Mostly Orange Exhibition (with Carmelle Safdie), The Green Gallery East, Milwaukee WI

Best of 2011, Soloway, Brooklyn

Tide Pool Shop, Sara Meltzer Gallery, NYC

2010

Par Avion, Parlour No. 19 (home of D. Endo), Siena, Italy

First Rate Second Hand (calendar and poster launch and signing), Printed Matter, NYC

Brucennial, NYC

The Artist At Work, Recess Activities, New York NY

A Reluctant Apparition, Sue Scott Gallery, NYC

2009

Supermarket Art Fair, with Galleri 54, Stockholm, SE

2008

Memories of Development, Pocket Utopia Gallery, Brooklyn, NY

Kunstpublikationer 2008, Overgade Institut for SamtidskunstCopenhagen, DK

Brevity’s Rainbow, Cinders Gallery, Brooklyn, NY

2007

Darling What Color, Thrust Projects, NYC (with Matthew Lutz Kinoy)

Boksläpp, Galleri 300m3, Göteborg, SE

2005

No Apology for Breathing, Jack the Pelican Presents, Brooklyn, NY

Tutti Frutti Miami Basel, Miami, FL

Memorial Daze, RKL Gallery, Brooklyn, NY

Sisters, The FreshUp

Club, Austin, TX

2004

The Liberty Fair, New York, NYC

Horror Vaccui,The Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, NYC

The Lucky Seven, The Cooper Union School of Art, NYC

 

Awards & Residencies

2013

Artist in Residence, Scuola Grafika, Venice, Italy

Artist in Residence, The Shandaken Project, NY

2011-2013

Full Scholarship with TA, Mason Gross School of the Arts, Rutgers

2010

Artist in Residence, Recess Activities, New York City

2008

Lundgrenska Stiftelsen Award, Sweden

Artist in Residence, The Press at Colorado College, Colorado, USA

Guest lecturer at Bennington College, Vermont, USA

Guest lecturer at California College of Art, San Francisco.

2007

Otto och Charlotte Mannheimer Fonden Award, Sweden

2004

Pietro and Alfrieda Montana prize for excellence in drawing and sculpture

2002

New York Central Supply Award

2001

Frank Caldiero Humanities Award, Cooper Union

Teaching Experience

2010-Present

Gallery/Studio Museum Educator, The Brooklyn Museum

2014 Adjunct Printmaking Instructor, St. Joseph’s College, Brooklyn

2012-2014

Assistant Professor, Undergraduate Foundation Program, Rutgers University

 

Publications

First Rate Second Hand. Collaborative annual wall calendar published with Carmelle Safdie, since 2006, available at Printed Matter, NY

Girls Like Us. Illustrations for the magazine’s WORK issue, spring 2013

Dinner at the Prince’s Zoo. Artist’s Book, 2013. Silkscreen, edition of 20

Picture Clocks in Full Color. Artist’s Book, 2013. Silkscreen and monotype, edition of 8

Speeding Down the Spiral. Illustrations for the children’s book by Deborah Goodman Davis, 2012.

My Marriage from A-Z.

Illustrated book of Elinor Nauen’s prose poems, Cinco Puntos Press, 2011

Police and Nudes. Artist’s Book, 2011. Unlimited edition, available at Printed Matter, NY

Color: A New Novel. Artist’s Book, 2008. Edition of 20, produced on letterpress at Colorado College

This is What She’s Like: Girls’ Portraits Left More or Less to the Imagination. Artist’s Book; coloring book, 2008. Silkscreen, unlimited edition, available through A Shoal of Mackerel, Sweden.

 

Recent Press

Artforum.com, Critic’s Pick. July 18th, 2014. “The View from the Window” by Samara Davis

The Catskill Daily Mail, April 2014. “A Dazzling Dance of Words and Meanings,” by Audrey Matott

Art In America, Previews, January 21, 2014. “$50 and Under: The Artist Tag Sale” by Brian Boucher