Sojourner Truth Parsons “My name is not Susan”

Foxy Production

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“My name is not Susan,” Sojourner Truth Parsons’ second solo exhibition at Foxy Production, conjures twilight zones where light strikes bodies and objects. The artist’s acrylic and collage paintings portray liminal spaces, times, and feelings—between inside and outside, day and night, love and fear—where windows are portals to other dimensions. Metallic blues in low-light harbor mystery and sublimation, where negative space and—as the exhibition’s title suggests—the proclamation of who one is not, may be more fitting than voicing who one is.

The artist’s experience of isolation during the COVID era—both in her studio and on her night-time walks observing a depopulated city—is a central metaphor of the new paintings, inflecting them with feelings of exile and autonomy. Parsons presents moments in the near dark, where some stories are slowly revealed, while others remain elusive.

Gender and race are intuitively immersed in many of the works: black female silhouettes contrast with blocks of color or emerge from blackness, contrasting with hard-edged fields of single colors. Parsons’ work is neither directly autobiographical nor narrative in form: it strives for a sense of intimacy, where the boundary between interior and exterior worlds collapse and felt experience is recognized. The artist works to strike a balance between openness and obscurity in a mix of illusion, desire, and pain: “It is my hope that, through the process of rendering these scenes, critical truths can be glimpsed and a provocative sense of wholeness can emerge.”