With their canny palette and crude perspective, the paintings of Sojourner Truth Parsons readily dispense with distinctions between interior and exterior worlds. Rendering the atmospheric and emotive energies she encounters as lucidly as physical truths, the Canadian-born artist observes a broad affective terrain in her work, documenting the dizzy indulgences of glamour and money as gamely as the dark heat of shame.
Holding Your Dog At Night brings together a series of canvases produced by Parsons since she relocated to Los Angeles in 2015. Whether detailing the city's infamous nightlife, its extraordinary sunlight or the economic disparities on which it is built, Parsons' works offer a kind of baroscopic depiction of the spaces and places she moves through, at once ingenuous and acerbic. Neither autobiographical nor narrative in form, these paintings instead nudge us toward the psychic life of the everyday, to the feelings, forms and fantasies—both saccharine and sinister—that structure our worlds.
Sojourner Truth Parsons (b. 1984, Vancouver) is an artist of Black, Mi'kmaq and settler heritage. She received her BFA from NSCAD University in 2008. Her recent exhibitions include Tomorrow Gallery, New York; Night Gallery, Los Angeles; Galerie Sultana, Paris; and Foxy Production, New York (all 2016). Holding Your Dog At Night is Parsons' first solo museum presentation.
