Lovesickness with Trees: Recent Work by Sophia Heymans and Garrett Perry

SooVAC is pleased to announce this exhibition will travel to University Art Gallery at The University of Wisconsin - La Crosse in September.

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Lovesickness with Trees explores the physicality of process painting combined with concepts that examine an escapist rejection of adulthood. Both artists in the exhibition, Sophia Heymans and Garrett Perry, implement a sophisticated understanding of the textural complexities of abstract expressionism while embracing levity in their narrative styles.

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Sophia Heymans’ works embraces the scale and grandeur of sweeping landscapes, employing both acrylic and oil paint in combination with embedded found materials. She not only finds art historical context in abstract expressionism but also narrative groundings in American Folk Art. Her paintings become ruminations on the impact of growing up surrounded by the wetlands, prairies and wooded lakes of Central Minnesota. Sophia states: “These pieces embrace our often comic relationship to nature, separate from our 21st century technological existence but not as some sort of escapist delusion or romantic fantasy.” Sophia Heymans received her BFA at Rhode Island School of Design in 2012 and currently lives and works in Saint Joseph, MN. Her work has been exhibited both nationally and internationally.

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Garrett Perry on the other hand incorporates escapism into his core conceptual motivations, using the work as a stream of consciousness exploration of nostalgic fantasy versus adulthood. Perry relates this process of acceptance to the words of Virginia Woolf, “Growing up is losing some illusions, in order to acquire others.” That tone of anxiety versus acceptance is also reflected in Perry’s paint handling with moments of thick frenzied gestures and other moments of controlled almost architectural illustrations. Perry exerts control over his groupings of work through the process of editing creating the larger narrative from a similar process to what produces much of his source materials from popular culture. Garrett Perry received his BFA from College of Visual Arts, St. Paul MN in 2008 and lives and works in Minneapolis. His work has been exhibited throughout the upper Midwest.

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