Sophia Flood

"In what world might we hang a portrait not of a loved one but of Earth’s closest asteroid? Bennu, a painting by Sophia Flood, captures our nearest asteroid’s likeness on canvas scrap nestled in plaster nestled in wood. The asteroid Bennu is an amalgamation of planetary material that may or may not hit Earth next century. It is essentially core-less, without its own center, a structure made up only of other structures. With Flood, as with the other artists presented here, there’s a sense that ideas don’t come onto the scene fully formed but are being chased during creation. They’ve each invented their own idea-generating structure that prods an experience wherein even the self is mutable and will be changed.

"Flood’s paintings stage cores as held within forms that cradle or ripple in/out. There’s a peeling back of layers—not to expose the inner workings of a subject or reveal some truth, but rather to expose how layers hold and withhold, are seen and unseen. Flood’s forms can be skeletal, floral, or geological as a way of implicating time, tethering her paintings to something tactile and pushing against what could be engulfing abstraction. In Lady, a half-skeleton half-body heat map feels like a fitting subject to be moored within cavernous forms, like some kind of infrared night scene through a window. When I see Flood’s dusk toned paintings made with, I imagine, the slowest of gestures, I consider my own eventual un-layering and think, 'Hold this, now hold this, now hold this even longer.'"