Exhibition Description
Sophie Eisner
Absolute Truth
March 2 – April 6, 2019
Simone DeSousa Gallery is pleased to present Absolute Truth, a solo exhibition of new drawings and sculptures by Sophie Eisner.
Borrowing from the language of architecture and design, Eisner reimagines common shapes in various colors, materials, shifts in orientation, and scale. By blending the familiar and the strange in both direct reference to utility and bodily material gestures, this work explores the relationship between the physical world, emotion, and memory. A sensitivity to materials and mark-making grounds the work in the physical while elevating the subjective.
“My work is not autobiographical, but it is personal. I look to the house where I grew up for inspiration and draw upon details such as the bathroom tiles, the color of a quilt, the proportions of the kitchen sink. Tethering my work to my own experience creates an avenue for empathy. I trust that something that has had emotional impact for me will resonate with others, even if their story is different. Rather than illustrating a narrative, I want to communicate a feeling, or, as is often the case with memory, a number of feelings mixed together.
On a road trip this fall I listened to a podcast about a phone booth in the middle of the Mojave Desert with nothing else around it. It is an image of extreme loneliness. The absence is palpable and yet there is a feeling of potential.”
In Absolute Truth, Eisner explores this moment of of “both/and.”
Absolute Truth will be on view through April 6.
Sophie Eisner (b. 1985, New York City, NY) received her BA from Carleton College (Northfield, MN), a Post-Baccalaureate Certificate in Fine Art from Maryland Institute College of Art (Baltimore, MD), and her MFA from Cranbrook Academy of Art (Bloomfield Hills, MI).
Eisner has exhibited in the United States, Australia and the Netherlands, and her work has been placed in several private collections. She has been a visiting artist and critic at College for Creative Studies in Detroit, Cranbrook Academy of Art, Carleton College and the University of Louisville, where she gave the 2018 Nora Iasigi Bullitt Memorial Lecture. Eisner has received awards for her artistic achievement from the Muskegon Museum of Art and Carleton College.