DREA COFIELD
DREA COFIELD | LOTUS EATERS September 13 - October 27, 2018
“With Feeling” Gaby Collins-Fernandez
W
e never know the pleasure that consumes the lotus eaters. We barely even see the sailors who waywardly partake, Odysseus is so busy hog tying them under benches to get back to sea, on course, towards home. The problem with these fruits is not just lethargy and hedonism. This pleasure arises when homewardness, the whole point of the epic, is abandoned. Pleasure as the state of emancipation from the need to return: this is an apt way to describe the ethos of Drea Cofield’s paintings and ink drawings, which is not to imply a disregard for consequences. The work is often on the cusp of spilling over into whatever is next emotionally and physically, the particularities of how the scene came to be eclipsed by its momentum. When were the apples not ripe? Everything is ripe in these paintings. Ripe tears and dew, ripe afternoons; figures which ripely chase and tumble into watching shades and leak; limbs ripe for climbing. See: Boughs who threaten heavy drips onto the action of “The Noble Bliss” from that top left edge. The baked saturation of “Heat Blush” only heightened by the darkened figure in the foreground, which absorbs the glazed, warm atmosphere like a mass of buffed ballpoint
ink. The way “Shame with Candor’s” pink river blushes around its peeping and disrobing protagonists. The paintings can be saturated with sex but are not about sex, exactly. Or, they are about sex sometimes, as con-sensation—the works are filled with the evidence of scattered sentience, a kind of connective tissue. Butts blush and wink. Pools blink, nipples peep, and of course eyes do. Impressions layer like paint and the paint is into it too, as though the surface of each painting were the body in question, reddening from the exertion of producing the tableau and a self-aware pleasure in its content. Cofield’s process of making the paintings through layered glazes feels like an extended blush biological or cosmetic, liquidly emanating a warmth toward these routines in their strange play, moments of sexiness and banality. This self-awareness spreads to the viewer, who, casting a gaze upon these paintings, becomes enmeshed in this network, yet another shrub looking on. Homeward-ness is one way of thinking about allegories, which draw faraway scenarios with homeward lines. They are like daytrips just far enough away that we begin to long for the newly visible contours of the
familiar. Most allegories travel back well, and the abstract weirdness with which allegorical texture is built can be tempered rather quickly by the objective to become useful through interpretation and application in real life. Though filled with recognizable gestures and games, Cofield’s allegories don’t quite work this way. I could bring back an image or gesture from the works the way one might carry around an obscure icon, compelled by the image but detached from its function. In Cofield’s works, this is by design. The iconic spools outward, turning into game, myth, the obstinate unintelligibility of the present. The longer I spend with the paintings, the more I settle on the parts of the work that pause, like the expression of the central figure of “Heat Blush.” That face is framed by the limbs of others—the very architecture of these bodies dependent on the figure—and in this spotlight they look away in some daydream or bittersweet thought, lightly un-invested in the proffering of fruit. Or, the faces and thighs of figures, doubled over and stacked but not coupling, which seem as certain in their positions as they are in questioning what, exactly, this might mean. Figures that doze oblivious and those wedged below pyramidal tangles of bodies, participatory but not ecstatic. Because one thing is for certain: these paintings, these
gestures, do not add up to a traditional concept of rapture, hellish or edenic. In this world, there is nowhere to be carried away to (for this is the away), yet there is a lot of carrying. This sense of circularity, even ambivalence, saturates many of the rituals in evidence here. What happens beyond puritanism and playing hard to get, when desire is characterized not by yearning but by access, when Sappho’s apples are within reach, to be snacked upon casually? Cofield’s paintings propose a way to move through these ideas. Don’t look back. Gaby Collins-Fernandez is an artist and writer living and working in New York City.
Heat Blush 2018 Oil on linen 40 x 30 inches
Be Fruit Full 2018 Oil on linen 60 x 50 inches
A Seer’s Ears 2018 Oil on linen 20 x 16 inches
The Noble Bliss 2018 Oil on linen 50 x 60 inches
Mount/Dismount 2018 Oil on linen 40 x 30 inches
Sappho’s Apples 2017 Oil on canvas 24 x 36 inches
Peek-A-Boo 2018 Oil on linen 16 x 20 inches
Shame with Candor 2018 Oil on linen 60 x 50 inches
Bliss 2018 Ink on paper 18 x 24 inches
Shame 2018 Ink on paper 24 x 18 inches
DRE A COFIELD
Lives and works in Brooklyn, New York EDUCATION 2013 M.F.A., Painting & Printmaking, Yale University School of Art, New Haven, CT 2008 B.A. Studio Art & East Asian Studies, DePauw University, Greencastle, IN SELECTED EXHIBITIONS 2018 Lotus Eaters, Solo Exhibition, Nancy Margolis Gallery, New York, NY How To, Group Exhibition, National Academy of Design, New York, NY This Kitten Got Your Tongue Tied, Group Exhibition, Beverly’s, New York, NY 2017 Right Side Out: The Modern Self-Portrait, Group Exhibition, Able Baker Contemporary, Portland, ME Summer 2017: Drea Cofield & Ping Zheng, Nancy Margolis Gallery, New York, NY Ocotillo, Group Exhibition, Stella Elkins Gallery, Philadelphia, PA 2016 GRAMMAR, Group Exhibition, Coustof
Waxman Gallery, New York, NY Rise & Grind, a Mural Exhibition by Drea Cofield, Ideal Glass Gallery, New York, NY Bomb Pop-Up!, Group Exhibition, 1822 Fulton Street, Brooklyn, NY Drea Cofield, Solo Exhibition, Durden & Ray, Los Angeles, CA 2015 The Landscape Changes 30 Times, Group Exhibition, Anahita Gallery, Tehran, Iran 2014 Night Garden, Mural by Drea Cofield, Olde Mecklenberg Brewery, Charlotte, NC 2013 For Ed: Splendor in the Grass with Olymic Lad & Lass, Group Exhibition, New Haven, CT Seduction, Group Exhibition, C.C.C.P. North Light Gallery, Brooklyn, NY We Had Lunch Together, Solo Exhibition, Aisling Gallery at The Study, New Haven, CT Painting & Printmaking Thesis Exhibition, Yale School of Art, New Haven, CT
2012 Second-Year MFA Painting Exhibition, Yale School of Art, New Haven, CT Video Screening Curated by Meredith James & Michel Auder, New York, NY 2011 First-Year MFA Painting Exhibition, Yale School of Art, New Haven, CT Figuratively Speaking, Group Exhibition, Twenty-Two Gallery, Charlotte, NC 2010 Solo Exhibition, Whiskey Warehouse, Charlotte, NC The Hot Ones Only Get Hotter, Group Exhibition, Rogue Elefant Gallery, Indianapolis, IN 2009 Fetish, Duo Exhibition, The Low Road Gallery, Greencastle, IN Group Exhibition, International School of Painting, Drawing and Sculpture, Montecastello, Italy AWARDS & HONORS 2015 Rema Hort Mann Foundation Emerging Artist Grant Nominee 2012 Yale School of Art, Gloucester Painting Prize 2011 The Elizabeth Greenshields Foundation Grant Art Residency with Odd Nerdrum, Stavern, Norway
2009 National Society of Arts & Letters, Naomi Winston Scholarship Fifth-Year Intern Honor Program, DePauw University Art Department, Greencastle, IN Art Residency at the International School of Painting, Drawing, & Sculpture, Montecastello di Vibio, Italy 2008 Fritz-Smith Memorial Award, DePauw University Acquisition, Greencastle, IN WRITING & PUBLICATIONS 2018 Precog Magazine, Vol. 3 “Transformation,” contributor, “Suburban Myth.” 2017 The Brooklyn Rail, April 2017, illustrations for Critic’s Page, pages 7, 8, 10, 11, 13, 14, 15. 2016 Precog Magazine, Vol. 2 “Techno-S,” contributor, “Shag Shag,” “Slighting.” CURATORIAL PROJECTS 2018 How To. Three days of workshops taught by artists, immersive art, and music organized by BombPop!Up and produced by David Humphrey and the National Academy of Design at the National Academy of Design Museum & School, New York, NY.
2017 BPU02: I Want to Believe. A Six-Day art & music residency by BombPop!Up Productions including a group art show curated by Drea Cofield. Music performances, social programming & fundraising, and a printed pamphlet of artist-made conspiracy theories. Coustof Waxmas Annex, 10 Montgomery Street, New York, NY. 2016 BombPop!Up Show: A Three-Day Three-Story Art & Music Show Curated by Drea Cofield including 34 artists, a group show, 13 project spaces, 2 art performances, 4 music performances, on DJ, and one zine. 1822 Fulton Street, Brooklyn, NY.
Catalog © 2018 NANCY MARGOLIS GALLERY Courtesy of Nancy Margolis Gallery, New York and Drea Cofield © Drea Cofield Photography © All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reprinted, reproduced, or transmitted in any form or by any other means, electronic or mechanical now known or hereafter invented, without written permission of publisher.