IMAGES

For both Forde and Korpijaakko, the act of making paintings is a way to enter and work through a wide pool of imagery, to ask themselves how they see the things they paint, and how others experience the things they see. Sourced from their personal archives, the images derive from art historical references and printed pulp materials, photographs of the artists’ lives, and the image banks of their imaginations. For each artist, painting offers the distinct process of fusing and utilizing eye, hand, and mind. By replacing the mechanical and digital apparatuses that produced their source imagery with painting by hand, both painters digest and personalize the material, making the imagery their own and offering it new life.

Forde’s process is built on a hunger of self-exploration, combing through a recent art history, both potent and sexual, that includes painting and film from the last several decades. Important past subjects include artworks by Nan Goldin, Araki, and a still from Sex, Lies, and Videotape, often completed as oil pastel works on paper. Here, Forde presents three new oil paintings. Her work variously functions as aspirational dares, confessional provocations, and notes to self. autoportrait the change (for Courbet) portrays Forde’s recumbent naked body, cropped from waist to mid-thigh, wearing a cream lace garter set and black stockings, asserting her sexuality: how she wants to know herself and how she wants to be known by others. Alongside the paintings, this exhibition presents a recreation of Forde’s studio wall of research material, laden with personal artifacts that map her desire and heartbreaks, including such objects as a reproduction of Courbet’s Origin of the World, ticket stubs from travel and one from a screening of the 1995 film Sense and Sensibility, and a nude photograph her ex-husband took of her during a brief affair they had in their early twenties (a decade before they re-met and married).

For Korpijaakko, working through a vast inner reservoir, the paintings emerge from deep within. In some instances, he confronts his own relationship to the imagery, meditating on what captivates his attention or demands he bear witness, while considering how an image functions as part of a larger consciousness. The Human Face, a portrait comprised of many faces—painted, wiped away, and painted again—is an act of erasure through augmentation, resulting in an anonymous amalgamation marked by the temporal, a face waiting to be seen. Screen is a painting of an air vent that faces Korpijaakko while on the couch during his weekly therapy sessions. The architectural detail becomes his focus, an object onto which he projects the numerous, flickering associations residing within his subconscious. Three other paintings in the exhibition, Blue, Double, and Limbo, each depict bodies intimately intertwined. The original material, pre-Internet publications of amateur erotic personals that conceal the connection-seekers’ identities, exudes a coldness that belies their subjects’ desire, which is replaced with warmth, their yearning recognized, by the tenderness of Korpijaakko’s touch.

Sheila Forde (b. 1967, Kitchener, ON, Canada) lives in Montreal. After a year studying art, Forde switched her degree to Psychology, whereafter she worked in advertising through her twenties, becoming a stay-at-home mother in her thirties. She started making art after leaving her marriage in 2016. Forde pursues connections in the work and with her community with her excellent Instagram account @aslowdancer. This is the first significant exhibition of her work to date.

Tuomas Korpijaakko (b. 1976, Princeton, NJ) lives in New York. Korpijaakko has pursued the meaning of images and the language of their display in the collaboration NOWORK (with Pierre Le Hors), a conceptual and photographic project that manifested in over thirty publications and numerous installations over the last fifteen years. This exhibition marks a distinct evolution of that work and is the first to feature Korpijaako’s solo pursuit of painting.

Clockwise from door:

Tuomas Korpijaakko, The Human Face, 2024
Oil on canvas, 10 x 8 inches (25.40 x 20.32 cm)

Sheila Forde, ephemera, 1987-2024
French matted art print, art postcards, one 1996 love letter postcard, business cards, photographs, photocopied reference of art and photographs, photocopied reference of book covers and media, one stitched patch, 1996 cinema stub receipt for the film Sense and Sensibility, love potion receipt, receipt for wedding hat, 1996 tram ticket from Prague, printed passage of text from essay the love of the wolf by Hélène Cixous, archival ink on paper original drawing, oil pastel on paper original drawing, coiled tapestry ribbon and pearl pins from wedding bouquet, butterfly clip, one queen of hearts Ukrainian playing card with ink pen drawn through the hearts
Installation variable

Sheila Forde, in rushes fear, 2024
Oil on canvas, 10 x 8 inches (25.40 x 20.32 cm)

Sheila Forde, a bed of her teeth, 2024
Oil on canvas, 10 x 8 inches (25.40 x 20.32 cm)

Tuomas Korpijaakko, Limbo, 2024
Oil on canvas, 10 x 8 inches (25.40 x 20.32 cm)

Tuomas Korpijaakko, Blue, 2024
Oil on canvas, 8 x 10 inches (20.32 x 25.40 cm)

Tuomas Korpijaakko, Double, 2024
Oil on canvas, 8 x 10 inches (20.32 x 25.40 cm)

Sheila Forde, autoportrait the change (for Courbet), 2024
Oil on canvas, 10 x 8 inches (25.40 x 20.32 cm)

Tuomas Korpijaakko, 10,000 Dreams, 2024
Oil on canvas, 9 x 12 inches (22.86 x 27.94 cm)

Tuomas Korpijaakko, Screen, 2024
Oil on canvas, 9 x 12 inches (22.86 x 27.94 cm)

Installation photography of Sheila Forde, Tuomas Korpijaakko © Francisco Ramos

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