April 21 - June 8, 2024
From F:
“F is pleased to present Sheila Forde, Tuomas Korpijaakko, a two-person show of new paintings by Montreal-based Sheila Forde and New York-based Tuomas Korpijaakko (all works 2024). Hard and soft, punk and emotional, the works question how images function, their meanings and the responses they elicit, while recognizing the stratified layers of the artists’ own psychologies as evident in the unique process that painting provides. The exhibition is on view by appointment, from April 21 – June 8, 2024, at 4225 Gibson Street, Houston TX, 77007, with a public reception on April 21, from 2–5 pm.
For both Forde and Korpijaakko, the act of making paintings is a way to enter and work through a wide pool of imagery, to ask themselves how they see the things they paint, and how others experience the things they see. Sourced from their personal archives, the images derive from art historical references and printed pulp materials, photographs of the artists’ lives, and the image banks of their imaginations. For each artist, painting offers the distinct process of fusing and utilizing eye, hand, and mind. By replacing the mechanical and digital apparatuses that produced their source imagery with painting by hand, both painters digest and personalize the material, making the imagery their own and offering it new life.
Forde’s process is built on a hunger of self-exploration, combing through a recent art history, both potent and sexual, that includes painting and film from the last several decades. Important past subjects include artworks by Nan Goldin, Araki, and a still from “Sex, Lies, and Videotape”, often completed as oil pastel works on paper. Here, Forde presents three new oil paintings. Her work variously functions as aspirational dares, confessional provocations, and notes to self. “autoportrait the change (for Courbet)” portrays Forde’s recumbent naked body, cropped from waist to mid-thigh, wearing a cream lace garter set and black stockings, asserting her sexuality: how she wants to know herself and how she wants to be known by others. Alongside the paintings, this exhibition presents a recreation of Forde’s studio wall of research material, laden with personal artifacts that map her desire and heartbreaks, including such objects as a reproduction of Courbet’s Origin of the World, ticket stubs from travel and one from a screening of the 1995 film “Sense and Sensibility”, and a nude photograph her ex-husband took of her during a brief affair they had in their early twenties (a decade before they re-met and married).
For Korpijaakko, working through a vast inner reservoir, the paintings emerge from deep within. In some instances, he confronts his own relationship to the imagery, meditating on what captivates his attention or demands he bear witness, while considering how an image functions as part of a larger consciousness. “The Human Face”, a portrait comprised of many faces—painted, wiped away, and painted again—is an act of erasure through augmentation, resulting in an anonymous amalgamation marked by the temporal, a face waiting to be seen. “Screen” is a painting of an air vent that faces Korpijaakko while on the couch during his weekly therapy sessions. The architectural detail becomes his focus, an object onto which he projects the numerous, flickering associations residing within his subconscious. Three other paintings in the exhibition, “Blue”, “Double”, and “Limbo”, each depict bodies intimately intertwined. The original material, pre-Internet publications of amateur erotic personals that conceal the connection-seekers’ identities, exudes a coldness that belies their subjects’ desire, which is replaced with warmth, their yearning recognized, by the tenderness of Korpijaakko’s touch.
Sheila Forde (b. 1967, Kitchener, ON, Canada) lives in Montreal. After a year studying art, Forde switched her degree to Psychology, whereafter she worked in advertising through her twenties, becoming a stay-at-home mother in her thirties. She started making art after leaving her marriage in 2016. Forde pursues connections in the work and with her community with her excellent Instagram account @aslowdancer. This is the first significant exhibition of her work to date.
Tuomas Korpijaakko (b. 1976, Princeton, NJ) lives in New York. Korpijaakko has pursued the meaning of images and the language of their display in the collaboration NOWORK (with Pierre Le Hors), a conceptual and photographic project that manifested in over thirty publications and numerous installations over the last fifteen years. This exhibition marks a distinct evolution of that work and is the first to feature Korpijaako’s solo pursuit of painting.”
4225 Gibson Street
Houston, 77007 Texas
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