Sophia Narrett

“I strive for a willingness to go into difficult, honest spaces dictated by imagination, and then to understand and acknowledge the potential recklessness that abounds in these complex, unresolvable situations.”

Embroidered Paintings

Ms. Narrett’s work is a stage for what she calls “honest fantasy,” where she explores the interplay of her own personal experience and collective societal fantasies about gender, identity, desire, and pop culture. Her embroidered paintings, which use thread, wool and fibers to build darkly romantic narratives of men and women in group settings, begin with images sourced from social media including Tumblr, pop tabloids, soft core porn and fashion photography. She works from photoshop collage while watching television, often reality shows like The Bachelor or Married at First Sight, and weaves in images, ideas and plot lines from what she sees. The overall effect is melodramatically overwrought and the miniature visual world invokes the work of Hieronymus Bosch.

A native of Concord, Massachusetts, Sophia Narrett graduated magna cum laude with a BA in visual arts, Honors, from Brown University in 2010, and completed her MFA in painting at the Rhode Island School of Design in 2014. She has had solo exhibitions at venues including Arts+Leisure in New York and Space Gallery in Portland, Maine, and she has taken part in group exhibitions at Cindy Rucker Gallery in New York, The Department of Signs + Symbols in Brooklyn and Kunstforeningen GL STRAND in Copenhagen, Denmark, among others. Ms. Narrett’s work is included in the collection of the Rhode Island School of Design Museum. She lives and works in Brooklyn, NY.

Residency: Collapsing Fantasy

During her residency, Ms. Narrett will create the first of a series of sequential embroidered paintings that narratively consider how pop culture and personal experience can converge to depict collective fantasies and social issues related to gender, identity and desire. Throughout the process, she will explore how her use of thread builds and impacts visual images. Ms. Narrett will simultaneously craft miniature figures from sculpey clay to stand alongside the paintings, experimenting with the formal and conceptual relationship between the two media.