Sojourner Truth Parsons

Sojourner Truth Parsons (b. 1984 Vancouver, Canada) lives and works between the southern Catskill mountains and Brooklyn, NY. 

Sojourner Truth Parsons’s paintings act as indices for moments of intensity and intimacy, amplifying sensation, texture and tone. In the artist’s compositions, flashes of saturated colour, flattened space and familiar motifs come into relation, fraying the border between interior and exterior worlds. Through her use of rich, vibratory tone, Parsons locates and elaborates the subtlety of brief details and moments that might otherwise go unnoticed: fleeting interactions of light, sound and provoked memory. Through a seemingly cool, graphic repose, the artist’s depictions of transience are as ecstatic as they are mournful. The tableaux of silhouettes that emerge play with our sense of space: recognisable objects come forward and recede into darkness; narrative is held in stasis, creating moments of feeling rather than recognition.

Recent solo exhibitions include: If nobody wants you you’re free, Esther Schipper, Berlin (2023); My name is not susan., Foxy Production, New York (2022); Sojourner Truth Parsons: Holding Your Dog At Night, Oakville Galleries, Oakville (2017). Recent group exhibitions include: Downbeat, Marian Goodman Gallery, New York (2023); The New Bend, curated by Legacy Russell, Hauser & Wirth, New York (2022); L’Invitation au voyage, Esther Schipper, Berlin (2021), and This is America, Kunstraum Potsdam, Potsdam (2021).

Parsons’s work is included in the collections of Museum Voorlinden, Wassenar; The Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, Montreal; Oakville Galleries, Oakville; Portland Museum of Art, Portland; and Long Museum, Shanghai, among others.