Soren Hope

Artist Statement
I paint figures engaged with each other and with landscape, in narratives that are both overt and elusive. While I render figures and surfaces delicately, emphasizing the nuance of light on skin or fur, there is often an element of fumbling or grasping in the narratives. In much of my recent work, my paintings depict bodies negotiating perceived loss or danger of a benign and minuscule sort. I treat the body at a slightly larger-than-life scale, which elevates the figure while magnifying its corporeality. These scenes take place in grand bucolic settings, creating tension between the myopic absorption of the task and the vastness and beauty of the surrounding scene. 

With both the body and with narrative, I’m playing with what is withheld and what gets revealed to the viewer. In these painted scenes, the focus of the figures is often kept invisible, leaving the viewer in the same state of frustrated suspense as the subjects. Likewise, with my use of the figure in this body of work, I’m interested in what happens when certain clothing articles are left on or body parts hidden—the humor, awkwardness, or contextual pragmatism that’s present in a female body clothed only in a bathing suit bottom and a baseball hat. In all of this, I’m thinking about how we fill in the blanks when we are presented with only partial access, and the charge that exists in this state of unresolve.

Biography
Soren Hope was born in 1993 on the East End of Long Island. She received her Bachelor of Arts in Studio Art at Carleton College in 2015. She has exhibited paintings in group shows on Long Island and in Brooklyn. Soren exhibited her first solo show of large-scale paintings at Duck Creek Arts Center in Springs, New York in September 2018. Soren has attended artist residencies at Vermont Studio Center in November 2016, where she received a month-long full fellowship, and Home of the Brave in the ghost town of Cisco, Utah in November 2019.