Author | Winter Mendelson
Sophia Glass is a Brooklyn painter and multi-media artist. Aided by a background in Gender and Sexuality studies, Glass successfully explores cultural anxieties, corporeal excess, and the division between the beautiful and grotesque.
Glass pushes her subject up to the foremost front of the canvas. The result is an uncomfortable, unflattering yet often highly sexualized position. With elements of seduction and repulsion cohabiting her work, “ambiguity and disorderliness become catalysts for sexual excitation.” A viewer’s gaze is forced upon the unidealized and disembodied subject. In an almost scientific way, the subject is placed in a metaphorical petri dish left to become a mysterious object which begs its viewer for further exploration.
In the same vein as social implications, one of her recent installations, Untitled (2013), explores street harassment. The video was created in collaboration with fellow queer artist Erica Kermani. The setup is such where their mouths are juxtaposed as they mimic the comments that are potentially projected to women on the street daily. The dialogue slowly transforms into verbal retaliation against their antagonizers ending with “Fucking Stop. Enough. I’ve had it.”
Not only does she study gender from a feminist perspective, but Glass’s work also encourages a conversation on how queerness potentially disrupts social norms surrounding “coherent gender markers.”
Check out her Untitled video below along with samples of her work.
Please visit her website for additional information.
