Cub. Courtesy Foxy Production, New York.

Sojourner Truth Parsons’ “My name is not Susan” is her current solo exhibition of collaged paintings at Foxy Production, New York. The title comes from a 1991 Whitney Houston song of the same name about a woman confronting her lover when he called her by a previous girlfriend’s name. Parsons admires the assertiveness of the song’s central character. Having cycled through another dark city winter, coupled with the seemingly endless rollercoaster of the Covid era, she finds in Houston’s vocals a declaration of a sensuous self-confidence.

Two paintings in the exhibition belong to a time, toward the end of 2021, when the artist was doing a residency at Denniston Hill in the Catskills. There she questioned whether it made sense to plant waterlilies so late in the season. She wouldn’t get to enjoy them very long before the flowers retreated and their bulbs became buried under snow. She went ahead and planted them anyway, and realized she was wrong. Through the sheet of ice that lined the pond, she could see them peeking through.

*Writing the wrong*, 2021, Acrylic on canvas on linen, 60 x 65 in.

You can see the pond and lilies popping up, some still weighted with sentiment and others spry and erect, in “Writing the wrong,” 2021. The work welcomes you into the show and you should visit it again before leaving because it starts the cycle of the exhibition: seasons of reflection and expression. Her paintings are a diary of time spent, thoughts, and actions as fall surrendered to winter and spring re-emerged again.

It wasn’t dissimilar to how she worked at home, 96 miles south-east in Dumbo, where that winter she would paint the other works in the show. Watching the East River nurture whatever was left of the urban vegetation from her frosted studio window, she painted the six works simultaneously, in low-light with vibrant and wild colors as if they are demanding to be seen.

A range of blues and blacks are punctuated by bursts of rich colors, figures, shapes, and the occasional reveal of one of the many underlayers. “Blue by you ll,” 2022, has a metallic sheen that conjures water, the motif the artist returns to many times that connects her outside life with her studio practice. While painting, she took long walks everyday along the river, noticing the water distorting the light around her, just as it did in the countryside.

*Blue by you ll*, 2022, Acrylic on linen, 66 x 66 in.

Each painting comprises many layers. Parsons sometimes makes as many as thirteen iterations before turning the page to the next work. The end result is a reconciliation of the layers beneath the one most recently finished. Sometimes she yearns for the version she covered up and tries to go back there. The tension between memory and experience creates something new all together, an energy that can’t help itself from bubbling to the surface. It requires her, in places, to cut out and collage shapes that seem to spring from the canvas like lilies breaking through the ice.

Humor is one of the layers in her work. You can almost picture the artist smiling to herself as she paints her vivid shapes and forms. It’s a lightness that’s always underpinned by a passionate take on gender and race. Black female silhouettes contrast with blocks of color or emerge from landscapes. The theme of multiple identities has always been imbedded in her practice and in this exhibition there’s a hopeful and assured ownership of experience. But the work is neither directly autobiographical nor narrative in form: it strives for a sense of intimacy, where the boundary between interior and exterior worlds collapses.