Sophie Grant is an artist from California who currently lives and works in New York. Her aesthetic methodology is influenced by the unavoidably encoded nature within us, and inspired by cultural production that activates the space between the physical and metaphysical. Using composted formal fragments, her hybrid drawings reflect upon the gradual and immediate human experiences of both fading from and fighting for visibility and palpability. After receiving her BA from the University of California, Santa Barbara’s Department of Art in 2008, she completed the Painting’s Edge residency, and has exhibited in New York and California. This drawing, ‘Repeated Embrace’, signals something in peril that is also a threat. I manipulated octopi arms, aiming to simulate an intestinal material that could imprint formless traces, yet suggest the most intimate tendencies and operations. Forms wrestle: intestinal and skeletal structures blur human and animal experiences. Surfaces assert their presence, yet beg for penetration. These octopi drawings frustrate cravings for instant information-based recognition; instead transformed entities summon insecurities rooted in cultural relationships with everyday visual matter. This work attempts to honor matter occupied in the uncertain connectedness of a disordered and diseased world. Alarming at the onset of making, evolution and invasion are neither monstrosity nor stoppage: they facilitate conversations between those dead and those dying to live. These conversations sustain work that always makes for more work.
