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The latest artworks, exhibitions and happenings in the studio of Sophia Wallace, a conceptual artist working in mixed media (b. 1978 Seattle, lives in Brooklyn, New York).


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2 more days to see CLITERACY, 100 Natural Laws in Scenes A Faire at Dumbo Arts Center in Brooklyn. The exhibition closes at 5pm, Sunday, Oct. 21. Special shout to those of you who made it to the opening, met me at the gallery for a studio visit, or wandered in to DAC and we ended up talking for an hour about CLITERACY. It’s been wonderful to share this work with you.

Dumbo Arts Center (DAC)
111 Front Street, Suite 212
Brooklyn, NY 11201 
HOURS:
12 - 6 pm   Wednesday — Saturday
12 - 5 pm   Sunday 

Posted on Saturday, October 20th 2012

Ink on paper drawings available for sale, two of multiple. See all the new drawings here.

1. Take Your Virginity © Sophia Wallace 2012, Ink on Paper

2. Clit Abstract © Sophia Wallace 2012, Ink on Paper

For prices and available works contact:
Karl Erickson 718- 694-0831 or gallery(at)dumboartscenter(dot)org


Posted on Saturday, October 13th 2012

Installation detail of CLITERACY, 100 Natural Laws by Sophia Wallace Installation detail of CLITERACY, 100 Natural Laws by Sophia Wallace CLITERACY, 100 Natural Laws in Scenes A Faire at Dumbo Art Center, Brooklyn, NY Sophia Wallace in front of CLITERACY, 100 Natural Laws in her Brooklyn Studio, October 2012.

CLITERACY, 100 Natural Laws © Sophia Wallace 2012. Currently on view at Dumbo Art Center, details below. 

CLITERACY, 100 Natural Laws is mixed media project that explores a paradox;  the global obsession with sexualizing female bodies in a world that is illiterate when it comes to female sexuality. CLITERACY is a new way of talking about citizenship, sexuality, human rights, and bodies. The project reveals the – phallic as neutral – bias in science, law, philosophy, politics, mainstream and even feminist discussion, and the art world - which is so saturated with the female body as subject. Using text as form, CLITERACY explores the construction of female sexual bodies as passive vehicles of reception defined by lack. It confronts a false body of knowledge by scientists who have resisted the idea of a unique, autonomous female body and rather studied what confirmed their assumption that women’s anatomy was the inverse of male anatomy, and that reproduction was worthy of study, while female sexuality was most certainly not. In the last ten years there have been tremendous scientific breakthroughs in the understanding of the clitoris. The clitoris is exponentially larger and more complex than commonly thought. What we think of as the clitoris, is only the tip of the iceberg.  While this discovery is shocking in its late arrival, the problem of global ILLCITERACY is a salient allegory into the bigger problem of a female body, both cis and trans female, constructed by men, with false information, the goal of control and a culture that defines femaleness as inferior and female sexual organs as taboo. CLITERACY builds upon my photographic practice and ongoing exploration of how power shapes knowledge, often through use of the visual, for the purpose of social control. 

CLITERACY
is monumental in scope and scale with 100 Natural Laws that span 10 by 13 feet and a 6 foot neon piece suspended from the ceiling.  CLITERACY, 100 Natural Laws was completed during my Van Lier Fellowship in the Art Law Residency

CLITERACY 100 Natural Laws Scenes a Faire Art & Law Residency Exhibition
On View: Oct. 5-21 at Dumbo Art Center
POSTPONED!! Artist Talk: Sophia Wallace Oct. 16, 7-8:30pm at Dumbo Art Center 
111 Front Street, Suite 212, Brooklyn, NY 11201
Tel 718-694-0831  Email gallery@dumboartscenter.org
Gallery Hours: 12 - 6pm Wednesday - Saturday, 12 - 5PM Sunday

Info & Press Photos: 
CLITERACY 100 Natural Laws 
Sophia Wallace’s Studio:  studio( )sophiawallace.com 

Posted on Wednesday, October 10th 2012

CLITERACY, 100 Natural Laws by Sophia Wallace, 2012, opening night at Dumbo Art Center, Brooklyn, NY. Detail of CLITERACY, 100 Natural Laws by Sophia Wallace Detail of CLITERACY, 100 Natural Laws by Sophia Wallace Detail of CLITERACY, 100 Natural Laws by Sophia Wallace CLITERACY, 100 Natural Laws by Sophia Wallace, 2012, installation view at Dumbo Art Center, Brooklyn, NY CLITERACY, 100 Natural Laws by Sophia Wallace, 2012, installation detail at Dumbo Art Center, Brooklyn, NY CLITERACY, 100 Natural Laws by Sophia Wallace, 2012, installation view at Dumbo Art Center, Brooklyn, NY Sophia Wallace in front of CLITERACY, 100 Natural Laws in her Brooklyn Studio

Installation views of CLITERACY, 100 Natural Laws by Sophia Wallace  

The comments from all you wonderful people. Keep ‘em coming and feel free to propose your own laws. I’m reading all of them. 

CLITERACY 100 Natural Laws Scenes a Faire Art & Law Residency Exhibition
On View: Oct. 5-21 at Dumbo Art Center
111 Front Street, Suite 212, Brooklyn, NY 11201
Tel 718-694-0831  Email gallery@dumboartscenter.org
Gallery Hours: 12 - 6pm Wednesday - Saturday, 12 - 5PM Sunday 

Info & Press Photos: 

CLITERACY 100 Natural Laws 
Sophia Wallace’s Studio:  studio( )sophiawallace.com

Thank you to all who came to the debut of CLITERACY. It was seriously amazing to see the responses. Crowds around the wall laughing, pointing to laws, calling friends to look, camera phones out, one friend got goosebumps, and another cried. It was really something. Holy f****ng CLIT!

Posted on Friday, October 5th 2012

Exhibitions with Catherine Opie, Alex Prager, Erwin Olaf, Kelli Connell, et al.


          APRIL 2012 NEWSLETTER
Art by Sophia Wallace
I’m pleased to invite you to my upcoming exhibition and lecture at PHOTO CENTER NW April 12 & 13. This will be my first show in the verdant city of my youth, Seattle, Washington. I will be exhibiting 3 photographs and a video from the series On Beauty.

The last six months have been transformative. My work was curated in exhibitions in the US and abroad with Catherine Opie, Alex Prager, Erwin Olaf, Bruce Weber and more. While in Europe for the Museum exhibition No Fashion Please! I had the priviledge of being featured on ARTE, a German TV program. No Fashion Please! received extensive press including Italian Vogue, Wall Street Journal, Die Presse and many more. For those who could not make it to Vienna but are interested to see the show, there is a gorgeously printed hardcover exhibition catalog available  on ArtBook and Amazon.

Presently, I am in residence with the ART & LAW Residency Program run by VLA. We meet bi-monthly for critical seminars and will hold an exhibition this fall. Already, the residency is impacting my practice in unexpected and exciting ways. I look forward to sharing more about this experience and especially the new work with you all. 

Thank you for your continued support.

AUTHOR & SUBJECT – Contemporary Queer Photography
PHOTO CENTER NW  | Seattle, Washington
On View: April 5 – May 27, 2012
Participating artists: Sophia Wallace, Kelli Connell, Rafael Soldi, Katie Koti, Adrain Chesser, Steven Miller, Chad States, Lorenzo Triburgo, Molly Landreth, Amelia Tovey
OPENING RECEPTION  | Thursday, April 12th | 6:00 – 9:00PM
After Party party at the Wild Rose in Capital Hill
LECTURE  | Sophia Wallace & Kelli Connell
Friday, April 13th | 6:30 – 8:00PM

For more information, visit PCNW.org
Sophia Wallace and Catherine Opie
Sophia Wallace shows with Catherine Opie
View installation photos of A Fine Line: Private Lives for Public View at Colgate University’s Clifford Gallery. In this four person exhibition, Wallace showed 21 works from the autobiographical series Truer with Catherine Opie, Jason Hanasik and JoAnne Santangelo.
Press Preview No Fashion Please
No Fashion Please! reviews by Italian Vogue, Wall Street Journal, ARTE TV
At KUNSTHALLE Wien Museum in Vienna, 19 international artists reject traditional notions of fashion, gender and beauty. ‘From Jeff Bark’s painterly and perverse “Flesh Rainbow” to Sophia Wallace’s portraits of feminized male models, these daring and reckless experiments veer closer to the ceremonies and rituals of body art than to fashion.’ Download complete press here
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Collect Catalog No Fashion Please!
Copyright © 2012 Sophia Wallace Photography, All rights reserved. 
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Posted on Wednesday, April 11th 2012

INTERVIEW WITH ARTIST SOPHIA WALLACE by Jeanne Vaccaro

Raadiy, No. 2

Conceptual artist and photographer SOPHIA WALLACE donated “Raadiy No. 2” fromthe series Modern Dandy to Sylvia Rivera Law Project’s SMALL WORKS FOR BIG CHANGE. Modern Dandy was a recipient of PDN’s The Curator award 2011 and was Critic’s Pick by the Griffin Museum of Photography 2011. It was selected for Identities Now: Contemporary Portraiture a hardcover book by Peter Hay Halpert Fine Art available Autumn 2012. It also earned honorable mention in Magenta’s Flash Forward 2011. It has been exhibited in numerous galleries including MiLK Gallery this July, the Affordable Art Fair NYC in the spring of 2011, the Chelsea Art Museum for the NUTURE Art and more.  

Jeanne: Tell me about the work you’re donating to SMALL WORKS FOR BIG CHANGE?

Sophia: I selected Raadiy No. 2 from the series Modern Dandy. In this project, I explored the concept of dandyism as a radical rejection of gender normativity and reference a history of dandyism that reaches back to the late eighteenth century. InModern Dandy, the models are represented as fashion icons, linked to a history of black dandyism. Often misunderstood as superficial, dandyism is rather a position of utilizing aesthetic practices on ones body – sartorial elegance, androgyny, beauty – to create a form of freedom.  Dandyism is available to men, women and transgender individuals. This openness is perhaps what makes it so threatening.

Jeanne: Why is it important to you, as an artist, to donate work to the SYLVIA RIVERA LAW PROJECT?

Sophia: Since it’s founding, SRLP has been on the front lines of the gender justice movement. I strongly support their mission to empower individuals to self-determine one’s own gender identity. Moreover, that SRLP specifically targets gender non-conforming populations who are of color and/or poor separates SRLP from organizations who lack an inter-sectional analysis of inequality. The law is a powerful tool that is often out of reach for those who need it’s protection the most. Therefore, SRLP has rightly positioned itself – targeting those who are in the very greatest need of it’s remedies.

Jeanne: How is making art a tool for social justice?

Sophia: It certainly depends on the artist. Art that sells for millions, by millionaire artists who use studio assistants and fabricators to make their work – are supporting an idea of art as the domain of the most elite in our society. In my practice, I explore how subjects are used in pictures to re-inscribe power. Often I use fashion as a Trojan Horse to move past the gates of subconscious prejudice on the part of the viewer. Once inside, I deploy my art. This is necessary, as the medium of photography is often wielded to globalize the notion of the ideal. My work is a discursive response to the imagery that dominates our visual landscape.

Posted on Tuesday, February 21st 2012

Reblogged from WHATEVER JEANNE

Untitled (Purity) from the series On Beauty, ©  2010 Sophia Wallace
If you are in Seattle, please join me at my upcoming exhibition. I’ll be showing photographs and a new video in Author and Subject: Contemporary Queer Photography at PHOTO CENTER NW.
Participating Artists: Kelli Connell, Katie Koti,Molly Landreth, Steven Miller, Adrain Chesser, Rafael Soldi, Chad States, Amelia Tovey, Lorenzo Triburgo and Sophia Wallace.
Author and Subject: Contemporary Queer PhotographyOpening Reception: Thursday, April 12th, 6:00-8:00PMMore info here.

Untitled (Purity) from the series On Beauty, ©  2010 Sophia Wallace

If you are in Seattle, please join me at my upcoming exhibition. I’ll be showing photographs and a new video in Author and Subject: Contemporary Queer Photography at PHOTO CENTER NW.

Participating Artists: Kelli ConnellKatie Koti,Molly LandrethSteven MillerAdrain ChesserRafael SoldiChad StatesAmelia ToveyLorenzo Triburgo and Sophia Wallace.

Author and Subject: Contemporary Queer Photography
Opening Reception:
 Thursday, April 12th, 6:00-8:00PM

More info here.


Posted on Saturday, February 4th 2012