Sojourner Truth Parsons at Tara Downs

Artist: Sojourner Truth Parsons

Exhibition title: Dolphin, take me with you

Venue: Tara Downs, New York, US

Date: September 17 – October 22, 2017

Photography: all images copyright and courtesy of the artist and Tara Downs, New York

Dear Linda,

For you, a tournament of roses. Souvenir de la Malmaison, Constance Spry, Fair Bianca, Claire, Königin von Dänemark, Teasing Georgia. A light red bruise is called a quartered, rosette bloom; sibyl to sibylle, a monophyletic strand of nightmares: these strange, sad ladies whose deep pink names synthesize sincerity.

To find structure at the center of the garden tightly trimmed, we conceived the garden as center to this wet Pacific cruising. Toni and Priscilla are here lapping up shards of spreading sturdy cane – bluegreen foliage and a black as brown as black. We fastened all we could to perishable forms, and this part is hard for us to speak of, near-aphasic or the opposite of cold comfort. There are the biographical details, which are something never to disforest.

For once, the earliest and latest times in the trellis have only one node. Mapping by set partitions, is the random variable Diane or the way the money’s counted? Betty, Tom, Henri, Judy, and Pierre are different; for them, the state space of the hidden variables is discrete in any trellis modulation. Outside that thaw house of alternate rheologies, the dinner party mid-sojourn in Veutheuil. No one has helped you into carriages, tin floors and tinsel under never cyaneous skies. Knowing that return is another crossing, it seems inappropriate how the wind corrugates the surface of the waterwaterwater.

Call it your target heart rate, call it the heat index, call it this running economy’s oversupinations. A plenitude of itinerant lusts finds banded peacocks’ pavonation slurring into chimerical birdwings on island marbles of Palos Verdes blue. This is to say the butterfly kouros is a fabled, if perilous, otherness or a box within the box of one’s fractionalized identity. That intemperate change of moon: a delta between discussion and discission, raked up angles from racing to the ontological totality of race, the lost scholarship and stoned leçon. No songs are appropriate to the risks taken.

Two figures stand in fantasized balance against these undulant, citrus-fruiting walls. Nearer, even if deep pink with pale edges, almost no species glows west of Kansas. Here, however, a habanera embers like a star that rises next to Mars. This designates that we may build a very small, essomenic fire, of varying effectiveness. We seek a collective memory as soft as the sound of the tongue in your mouth, and, otherwise, its perpetual renovation.

When cinders fall on Ivy’s dreamy castle, its zig-zag lyricism a prison of trellises, no one comes to sit in these chairs, these chaises an inventory of waves and wages. All this time, we are seated. Upstream, the river is a rainbow family, albumen to atrous, of slow dribbles. Exlineal, the way invoking the voice of a woman who exists without context is a bristled sanctity. Those caducous shadows are easily detached and falling at maturity; a season unsettled, the so-long helianthine days end in heart-shaped leaves and heads as thick and dark as trees.

Having left, we want to feel the speed and pulse of moving. Vacillando.

Yours,
D.R.

Sojourner Truth Parsons (b. 1984, Vancouver; lives and works in Los Angeles) gained her BFA at Nova Scotia College of Art & Design, Halifax. Solo exhibitions: Downs & Ross, New York; Oakville Galleries, Toronto; Tomorrow Gallery, New York; Night Gallery, Los Angeles; Phil Gallery, Los Angeles; Mulherin, New York; Katharine Mulherin Contemporary Art Projects, Toronto; 161 Gallon Gallery, Halifax; Seeds Gallery, Halifax; Eyelevel Gallery, Halifax. Recent group exhibitions: Downs & Ross, New York; 11R, New York; Foxy Production, New York; Galerie Sultana, Paris; 4619, Los Angeles; Cooper Cole, Toronto; Jessica Bradley Gallery, Toronto; Night Gallery with Know More Games, New York.

Sojourner Truth Parsons, Water falling on flower, 2017, Canvas, archival adhesive, acrylic on canvas, 84 × 84 inches / 213.4 × 213.4 cm

Installation View: Sojourner Truth Parsons: Dolphin, take me with you, 2017, Downs & Ross, New York

Sojourner Truth Parsons, Slow runner with the fireflies, 2017, Canvas, archival adhesive, acrylic on canvas, 84 × 102 inches / 213.4 × 259.1 cm

Sojourner Truth Parsons, Everybody anyone, 2017, Canvas, archival adhesive, acrylic on canvas, 60 × 60 inches / 152.4 × 152.4 cm

Sojourner Truth Parsons, Gwendolyn loves Charlotte, 2017, Canvas, archival adhesive, acrylic on canvas, 102 × 12 inches / 259.1 × 30.5 cm

Sojourner Truth Parsons, View from Diane II, 2017, Canvas, archival adhesive, acrylic on canvas, 96 × 72 inches / 243.8 × 182.9 cm

Sojourner Truth Parsons, Water falling on flower, 2017, Canvas, archival adhesive, acrylic on canvas, 84 × 84 inches / 213.4 × 213.4 cm

Sojourner Truth Parsons, Sitting in the sun counting my money sitting in the sun across from you, 2017, Canvas, archival adhesive, acrylic on canvas, 84 × 84 inches / 213.4 × 213.4 cm

Sojourner Truth Parsons, Water falling on flower, 2017, Canvas, archival adhesive, acrylic on canvas, 84 × 84 inches / 213.4 × 213.4 cm

Sojourner Truth Parsons, View from Diane I, 2017, Canvas, archival adhesive, acrylic on canvas, 96 × 72 inches / 243.8 × 182.9 cm

Installation View: Sojourner Truth Parsons: Dolphin, take me with you, 2017, Downs & Ross, New York

Sojourner Truth Parsons, For every black woman in prison, 2017, Canvas, archival adhesive, acrylic on canvas, 60 x 48 inches / 152.4 x 121.9 cm

Installation View: Sojourner Truth Parsons: Dolphin, take me with you, 2017, Downs & Ross, New York

Sojourner Truth Parsons, Everyday with Diane, 2017, Canvas, archival adhesive, acrylic on canvas, 84 × 84 inches / 213.4 × 213.4 cm

Sojourner Truth Parsons, Overshine, 2017, Canvas, archival adhesive, acrylic on canvas, 60 x 48 inches / 152.4 x 121.9 cm