Flashback- Sofia Love at Shelter in NYC

 Art, Art Shows by Location, Artists, Mixed Media, New York Art Shows, Painting / Painters, Sculptors / Sculpture
Oct 312025
 

Today’s flashback is to a few of the intricate works from Sofia Love‘s 2023 exhibition Vaquera at Shelter in NYC.

From the gallery about the exhibition-

Vaquera – not determined by an article, the word becomes both a noun and an adjective, an iconic figure and a way of being in the world. For Brooklyn-based painter Sofia Love’s debut solo exhibition in New York, vaquera is both a manifesto of queer self-fashioning and a patron saint.

Born and raised in Boston, but with deep family ties to the Mexican community of Laredo, TX, Love’s acrylic paintings serve as a negotiation between ancestral memory and contemporary identity. The titular cowgirl recurs throughout the exhibition – gun-slinging, brown, and frequently nude – framed by expanses of desert. She’s a real, historical cowgirl. She’s the artist traversing her own imagination. She’s a badass dyke. For Love, vaquera is an object of desire and an extension of herself.

While there are traditional canvases, the majority of works on view take the form of nichos, intimate yet elaborately decorated altars that can be found in homes across Mexico. Dedicated to deceased ancestors or particular saints, nichos blend folk spirituality with Catholicism, smuggling pre-Colombian vernacular traditions into contemporary, Westernized culture. Love’s nichos draw on this history to produce art objects that exist at the border of painting and sculpture, with frames that extend the content and imagery of the paintings they enshrine.

The resulting works each have interiors and exteriors, the painting and the frame, in which ambivalent scenes are surrounded by totems and animals that seem to hint at the psychological subtext of the central image. Figures reappear across the framed nichos like characters in a narrative, each with its own personal connotation for the artist. Skulls, moths, storks tell stories that are only partially legible from an external perspective. Like the vaquera herself, Love’s layered compositions refuse any easy interpretation.

 

NYC Art Shows- Kelli Thompson at Shelter Gallery

 Art, Art Shows by Location, Artists, New York Art Shows, Painting / Painters
Mar 092023
 

Kelli Thompson, “Forever Yours”, 2022

Kelli Thompson, “Quiet Time”, 2021

Paintings by Kelli Thompson, part of her exhibition Full Bloom, on view at Shelter in NYC until 3/12/23.

From the press release-

Using distinctly feminine anatomy paired with the sexual organs of flora, Thompson explores aspects of her physical existence as a woman. The result is paintings that are intensely personal while also, through the lack of distinctive characteristics, universal; the work functions as a reference to all women’s bodies and the botanical elements act as extensions of them. Acknowledging sexuality, while falling short of revering sexual beauty, the artist’s goal is not to highlight sexuality in femininity but to emphasize the visceral discomfort which often accompanies a woman’s physical experiences.

By separating and isolating parts of the figure, Thompson points to the way in which the treatment of the body based on definitive female functions often serves to define the woman as a whole. In doing so, she addresses the guilt, fear, anxiety, and profound unknown when being confronted with the limitations of physicality. Yet the work itself is not meant to manifest anxiety for the artist or the viewer; Thompson shows tremendous appreciation and compassion for the female body through the loving, and often obsessive, rendering of her subjects.

Recalling popular color palettes from her childhood, Thompson utilizes painted gradients created from multiple layers, blending until every mark is eliminated. This technique mimics digital fabrication, despite working solely within the boundaries of oil paint, a substrate, and the hand. This pristine level of finish places the artist’s work in dialogue with the historical tradition of realism within portraiture and still life painting, yet the juxtaposition of these subjects against abstracted formal elements situate them in a wholly fictional, artificial space. Through this process, Thompson is able to both highlight and re-contextualize realism.