How much do I know of this image? Not enough.

Claire M. Rich

Sophia Anthony, Lurker, oil on canvas, 2021.

Simultaneity, by definition, implies multiples: multiple perspectives, multiple truths, and multiple modes of working all at the same time. It alludes to the idea of the synchronous, the coexistent, and the parallel—all of which weigh heavily in any interpretation of Sophia Anthony’s recent body of work. Her work—which includes the combination of painting and drawing practices—is composite; she looks to internet ephemera (YouTube screenshots, clickbait photos, paparazzi snapshots) as she compiles source imagery for each work. And although Anthony is a classically trained portraitist and learned to paint from life, these works—which include A Passenger (2021) and Lurker (2021)—are anything but portraits. Through sourcing, combining, and referencing online imagery, Anthony creates generic figures that operate as ambiguous types with surroundings that take on the quality of mise-en-scènes.

Anthony thinks a lot about painting from a screen versus from life; she thinks about the slickness of the screen, the pixelation, and the degradation of the online image. Of the images themselves, she is interested in the boundaries associated with knowing and using imagery. She asks: “How much do I know of this image? Do I find out who this person is? Do I leave that to be an unknown?” Ultimately, a guiding question remains for Anthony: “What are the boundaries of knowledge in a work?”^[1] In her hands, viewers are reminded of an image’s power to both communicate and withhold information. The same goes for the artist herself as she selects her images. Anthony always questions herself as she takes inspiration: “What am I pulling from? What am I looking towards?”

At first glance, Anthony’s paintings read as normal images. Upon closer investigation, the purposefully disjointed nature of the composites become clear: the pieces don’t quite come together correctly. In creating her composite images, Anthony destabilizes the viewer’s expectations through subtle confusions. These anonymous figures are at once familiar and made strange as the rendered pieces of the composite clash against each other. In A Passenger, the viewer can’t help but question the ghostly and ambiguous hands: whose hands are these? Are they his? If so, why are they backwards? Anthony’s often uncanny rendering also extends to light and its sources. The figure depicted in Lurker is almost seen as secondary to the sharp lines of unseen reflections within the lenses of his glasses. The work seems to allude to the ghostly illumination of technology—and its hot, unnatural saturation—which overtakes the scene. Two daubs of hot orange-pink shift the temperature of the whole room; Anthony leaves nothing untouched.

[1] Taken directly from our Chat About session, this question—particularly in the context of Anthony’s work—is curious. Does it mean the boundaries between different kinds of knowledge, or between knowledge and non-knowledge? For the latter, I wonder if knowledge inevitably requires the presence of the audience. Is there inherent knowability within the work? These questions are in response to Anthony's work itself, as it is very much based on the content (even if it is obscure) rather than pure form. The knowledge of this specific content—which originates from the media—is all about the living world; this world, however, remains outside of the work. And yet, the knowledge that there is an original form might remain inherent to the work as well.

Sophia Anthony, A Passenger, oil on canvas, 2021.

There is an inherent relationship between (digital) photography and painting for Anthony, who exclusively uses photographs as her source imagery. However, she interprets the photos to suit her own intuitive sense of what the composition needs; she thinks about the photograph in paint. In choosing pixelated images, Anthony can choose how to gesturally respond to those image markings with her own handling: pixels are translated to brushstrokes and instantly take on qualities of immediacy and viscerality. In this sense, the art-historical idea of “facture,” that is, surface handling, seems to recall “fracture.” Images are taken to their most basic building block: a pixel, a brushstroke. The resulting finished paintings are intensely physical in their layering and resultantly imperfect surfaces. On one hand, Anthony’s resultant interpretation is vaguely realistic. On the other, it’s like looking through glass at an image that is slightly distorted. Anthony says that to her, this is what it feels like to look through a screen. This visual effect—created through Anthony’s composite style of mark-making—is partly reflecting a negotiation between the artist’s painting styles. She begins paintings with loose, gestural brushmarks which become tighter and tighter as she tidies her original painted surface. In reference to this ability, Anthony says that this shift in style can even feel like role-playing or being a chameleon as she fluidly shifts between ways of working.

Sophia Anthony, Blown Cover, graphite and charcoal on paper, 2021.

In Anthony’s drawing practice, her works also balance the simultaneous act of communicating and withholding information, albeit in a different way than her paintings. Here, presence is indicated by absence. (What has been cropped, left out, forgotten?) In communicating the difference between her painting and drawing practices, Anthony explained that “a composite painting is always a unified image whereas drawing is a little bit here and a little bit there.” For her, a drawing’s unfinished quality is more intriguing than if it was fully realized. The break in style—her unique combination of soft, photorealistic figures, contour doodles, and cross-hatching—emphasizes the improvisational nature of her drawing. There is a freedom suggested in this kind of mark-making; the doodles even serve as a creative release from the tight rendering of the central figures.

In looking at Anthony’s works—particularly when considering them slowly and closely, as the artist intends for her viewer to do—we are reminded that information, particularly information available online, is often taken for granted. Anthony withholds the narrative the viewer craves and replaces it with her own construction: a painting or drawing that is unsatisfyingly full of questions. In leaving ambiguities, negative space, and subtle confusions, she seemingly asks the viewer to reconsider the limits of knowledge. In looking at all images, the viewer must think: what can we learn? What can we take?

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Event date: Feb 4, 2022

Sophia Anthony (she/her) is an artist working primarily in painting and drawing. Her practice is interested in the exploration of photographic images through hand rendering, often contending with and negotiating the parallel portrayals of masculinity in painting and film. She holds an MFA in visual arts from the University of Chicago.

Claire M. Rich (she/her) is an MA candidate at the University of Chicago, where she broadly focuses on the intersection of exhibition history and theory, which encompasses her interests in materiality, alternative modes of making and display, artistic intent and autonomy, as well as institutional critique. Her thesis work, which sought to define the hybrid form of artist’s-book-as-exhibition-catalogue, explored the way in which artists capitalized upon the book’s versatile form to move beyond institutional boundaries. She currently works at the Smart Museum of Art as a Graduate Curatorial Intern for the exhibitions Monochrome Multitudes and Calling on the Past: Selections from the Collection.

chatted about / archive / a hard baby cleans / a passenger / blown cover / christ and spiderman / democracy now / fall / fixation object / fruit / hagia sophia / laptop masturbation / lurker / pietà / six-headed entangled figure / sleep noises / triple vision / untitled (shirt)

How much do I know of this image? Not enough.