Sofi Brazzeal’s exhibition, simply titled Drawings, explores permutations of desire and drive within contemporary image culture.

In her drawings, Brazzeal's warped bodies enact competing and conflicting desires. Her figures are often congregated even as others are alone, relegated to otherwise unoccupied areas of the drawings. Some figures are engaged in lewd activities, some look on, while others stare off in other directions, sidetracked or uninterested. These protagonists embody a series of contradictions present in the work: lightness and darkness, interior and exterior, anxiety and jouissance.

Brazzeal’s process involves appropriation and collage. She works from an extensive collection of diverse source material, which she roughly intercuts and reconstitutes to create new and strange configurations. Her relationship to her sources is ambivalent and she sees herself, like Deleuze, “taking [them] from behind and giving [them] a child which would be [their] own offspring, yet monstrous…because it resulted in all sorts of shifting, slipping, dislocations, and hidden emissions.”(1)

(1) Gilles Deleuze, Negotiations, (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995), 6.

Sofi Brazzeal divides her time between Montreal and New York. She graduated from Concordia University in 2005 and is currently pursuing her MFA in studio art at New York University.

The artist would like to thank Victor Buchanan for his insightful criticism and contribution to these works.