March 16 - April 16, 2023

Vaquera – not determined by an article, the word becomes both a noun and an adjective, an iconic figure and a way of being in the world. For Brooklyn-based painter Sofia Love’s debut solo exhibition in New York, vaquera is both a manifesto of queer self-fashioning and a patron saint.

Born and raised in Boston, but with deep family ties to the Mexican community of Laredo, TX, Love’s acrylic paintings serve as a negotiation between ancestral memory and contemporary identity. The titular cowgirl recurs throughout the exhibition – gun-slinging, brown, and frequently nude – framed by expanses of desert. She’s a real, historical cowgirl. She’s the artist traversing her own imagination. She’s a badass dyke. For Love, vaquera is an object of desire and an extension of herself.

While there are traditional canvases, the majority of works on view take the form of nichos, intimate yet elaborately decorated altars that can be found in homes across Mexico. Dedicated to deceased ancestors or particular saints, nichos blend folk spirituality with Catholicism, smuggling pre-Colombian vernacular traditions into contemporary, Westernized culture. Love’s nichos draw on this history to produce art objects that exist at the border of painting and sculpture, with frames that extend the content and imagery of the paintings they enshrine.

The resulting works each have interiors and exteriors, the painting and the frame, in which ambivalent scenes are surrounded by totems and animals that seem to hint at the psychological subtext of the central image. Figures reappear across the framed nichos like characters in a narrative, each with its own personal connotation for the artist. Skulls, moths, storks tell stories that are only partially legible from an external perspective. Like the vaquera herself, Love’s layered compositions refuse any easy interpretation.

Text by Christine Nyce