You Are Everyone Who Tells a Story
Curated by Mengna Da
March 17 – April 2, 2023
Opening Reception: Friday, March 17, 6-8 pm,
37-39 Clinton St., New York, 10002
Space 776 is pleased to present a duo female artists exhibition You Are Everyone Who Tells a Story featuring paintings by Wanying Jin and Evelyn Sosa curated by Mengna Da.
We live with and through each other’s stories. First-person narratives constitute the polyphonic texture of our reality, and discovery of the self is central to the construction of the concept of diversity. Yet the ego invariably separates the “me” from “us” in creating “other,” fermenting harmonious coexistence into discordant, dueling incongruities. Whose stories are being heard and the ways these stories are being told form the foundation of our shared reality.
Wanying Jin and Evelyn Sosa, two artists with a common focus on portraiture, bring their subjects into the spotlight; offering their works as a field for the exchange of stories born from experience and memory. The exhibition title You Are Everyone Who Tells A Story references the Polish writer Olga Tokarczuk who, in her 2018 Nobel Prize speech, outlined the concept of a fourth-person narrator as that of an all-inclusive, holistic storyteller. A narrator as such, a tender narrator, encompasses the perspective of each individual and by doing so acknowledges that every being is intricately connected even when some connections are not yet visible.
Wanying Jin (b.1995) has been creating a constellation of mythical characters since 2016. Pursuing truth and beauty in idealized forms, Jin depicts figures that are ambiguous in their gender, race, and cultural background – wandering souls whose stories are yet to be discovered by the audience. She looks back to Byzantine art and Netherlandish portrait paintings in order to reinvent a universal, androgynous, and expressive visual language. Love and desire are a fundamental current running through Jin’s works, and she aspires to present her paintings as a conduit for the viewers to catch a glimpse of their own relationships and longings.
The photography of Evelyn Sosa (b.1989) straddles documentation and performance, portraying women, the transgender, queer, and immigrant communities in Havana and New York. Her photos capture process and transition; sometimes tracking the different phases of a subject’s body over time, other times distilling single moments of opaque emotions. Sosa’s subjects are given free reign to express themselves in front of the camera; her deliberate removal of herself from the lens allows for direct contact between her subjects and the viewers. Intimate and upfront, Sosa’s portraits provide a sensually charged space not unlike the ones that we search for, often in despair, in order to build meaningful connections.
