FAMILY STRUCTURE:
Gaby Collins-Fernandez, Victoria Roth, and Emet Sosna

Curated by Julia Bland

June 18 – July 24 2022

Opening: Sunday, June 18 6-8PM

Soloway is pleased to present Family Structure, a three-person exhibition featuring works by Gaby Collins-Fernandez, Victoria Roth, and Emet Sosna, curated by Julia Bland.  

Family is an emotional structure.  In painting, as in familial life, individual expressions emerge with and through formal architecture and shifting social roles. And, like painting as a genre, “family” embodies the contradiction of being defined by the strictest terms and boundaries and requiring constant reinvention.  

Painting families form through common desires, environments, and experiences.  They have shared ancestors, accomplices, lovers, feuds, and rivalries.  They grow together, in contrast, over, and around each other.  Searching relentlessly through the twin expanses of interior solitude and social aesthetic meaning, Gaby Collins-Fernandez, Victoria Roth, and Emet Sosna describe the emotional arch of life as it is lived by painters in communion with each other. 

Born and raised in Inwood, NYC, Gaby Collins-Fernandez’s pitch perfect ear is tuned to the sound of competing symphonies. Play dates getting lost at The Met, skyscrapers and underground tunnels, her family, the intimacy of her neighborhood, and the broader Latin American diaspora fold and unfold into images that present a world both rich and layered, random and incomprehensible. Humor, tragedy, biting wit, and bleeding heart are pieced together from the vast reaches of her imagination, crystalizing into works that are at once autobiographical and socially poignant.

Victoria Roth’s paintings depict a world of heightened sensorial awareness. Color and texture push through and beyond the parameters of sight and touch, spilling over into speed and sound. Her prolonged painting sessions involve intense focus and strenuous precision, bringing forth forms that pulsate and strain on the verge of combustion. If the act of painting collapses time and space by recording motion in the painted gesture, and simultaneously depicting space frozen within the image plane, Roth’s work epitomizes the confounding beauty of this eternal epistemological dance.

The dreamscapes that unfold in Emet Sosna’s paintings capture their protagonists in the midst of discovery.  Peering through doorways, at each other, and into themselves, they consider the familiar view as if for the first time.  Everyday environments and interactions are reflected back to the conscious mind from a dream world where their full meaning blossoms.  Discovering each work slowly through layers of shifting imagery and motion, Sosna sends his characters on a journey back through time, searching for the origins of their inherited confusion.

Text by Julia Bland