Artist: Sophia Flood

Babst Gallery presents Sun and Its Living Shadow, a solo exhibition by Sophia Flood featuring paintings and works on paper.

Flood’s works explore how the passage of time is both experienced by the body and made visible on a landscape. Late afternoon sunlight refracted on her studio floor, for example, or the space under a giant tree outside its door are moments embedded within her paintings, both in form and in feeling. This source material roots Flood’s paintings in the physical world even as it is abstracted and obscured.

Turning an image over in her head, Flood works the canvas in search of forms associated with a core, embodied memory. Shapes and marks emerge as she slowly builds up and removes material. Past iterations of the painting reappear through her often subtractive process, helping to guide its evolution. As subtle shifts in color and texture convey the painting’s many stages, time is compressed into a rich, variegated surface.

Once completed, these layered, tactile images are at once solid and fleeting, occupying both positive and negative space. In Intertidal, Flood recalls a labyrinthine salt marsh riverbank at low tide. Using dry, opaque blue and clay-colored marks that weave in and out of linear blue stains, she conjures a subterranean world that is constantly shifting.

Sophia Flood (b. 1984, Ipswich, MA) lives and works in Los Angeles. Flood received her Bachelor of Fine Arts from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and her Master of Fine Arts from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She was a 2016 participant at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, and a 2017 resident at the Marble House Project in Dorset, VT. Her work has been exhibited at Shulamit Nazarian, Los Angeles, CA; Curve Line Space, Los Angeles, CA; Elsa Lee Bruno, Los Angeles, CA; Sadie Halie Projects, Minneapolis, MN and Brooklyn, NY; Torrance Shipman Gallery, New York, NY; and Herter Gallery, Amherst, MA. She has been written about in Two Coats of Paint, Hyperallergic, and The Coastal Post.