Ovid's paintings explore the interface between the built and natural world. He investigates different approaches to spatial organization using a combination of precise, almost trompe l'oeil-like painted renderings, areas of poured paint that create marbled effects, and sharp, angular planes (painted with iridescent pigment) that appear to change color, recede or come forward based on the placement of light and the viewer's position before them.
Goldfinch is proud to present "Leeway," our third solo exhibition with Sherwin Ovid.
Born in Trinidad and based in Chicago, Ovid's paintings explore the interface between the built and natural world. He investigates different approaches to spatial organization using a combination of precise, almost trompe l'oeil-like painted renderings, areas of poured paint that create marbled effects, and sharp, angular planes (painted with iridescent pigment) that appear to change color, recede or come forward based on the placement of light and the viewer's position before them. Pigment, resin, bubbles, and dirt are some of the materials that Ovid accumulates on the surface while constructing the illusionistic spatial environments of his works.
In Ovid's new paintings, partial glimpses of the pictorial and representational are situated within an array of flat and modeled compositional elements and are often enveloped by formal systems of abstraction. Ovid also makes use of the language of rational geometric diagrams, but upends them by making improvisational gestures through pours of slow-drying liquid mediums. This produces cascading layers of paint that act in contention to the rigid structures. Mixtures of contrasting iridescent color create visual vortexes, while undulating waves of marbled visual patterns catapult the viewer through different perceptual registers and visual scales.
Born in Trinidad, Sherwin Ovid earned his Bachelors degree from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. He was a Lincoln Fellow in 2013 at the University of Illinois at Chicago, where he received his MFA. He currently teaches as an Assistant Professor at Northwestern University and the University of Illinois at Chicago. Ovid has collaborated on art production with Lee Daniel’s Netflix feature The Deliverance, Lena Waithe’s Showtime drama The Chi, and Jordan Peele’s Monkey Paw Studio remake of Candyman, directed by Nia DaCosta. Ovid has exhibited with Demon Leg in New York and has participated in group shows at the Chicago Cultural Center, Lubeznik Center for the Arts, UIS Visual Arts Gallery, 6018North, Randy Alexander Gallery, Goldfinch Gallery, Gallery 400, Prison Neighborhood Arts Project, Humboldt Park Boathouse Gallery, University of Wisconsin, Cleve Carney Art Gallery, Julius Caesar, Haitian American Museum of Chicago and Iceberg Projects in Evanston. He was published in New American Painters in 2016 and in 2021 as a noteworthy feature, and in 2020 was included among New City Magazine’s Breakout Artists. This is Ovid's third solo exhibition with Goldfinch.
A Conversation with Sherwin Ovid, conducted by Elizabeth Lalley
Elizabeth Lalley: Your new body of work in this exhibition breaks apart and reassembles imagery of domestic space (primarily bathrooms). Within the abstracted, collaged compositions are flashes of familiar (or somewhat familiar) features like pipes, faucets, and pieces of furniture, but they’ve been disoriented, fractured, turned on end, and we, in turn, could be viewing these spaces from head-on or from above or from below, all at once. We’re floating in these spaces, with no apparent ground, though in moments it appears as though objects in the space are floating, too. Can you talk a bit about the domestic imagery used here? What are these spaces to you?
Sherwin Ovid: These are spaces where people are involved in deciding and learning how to live together in various arrangements between friends, families, partners, roommates, etc. They are saturated with memories of loss, vulnerability and blissful gatherings. Not only am I fascinated by the living arrangements but especially the décor and spatial arrangements. Within these spaces members of society are reproduced along with the production and exchange of various sorts of beliefs, values and ideologies. An enormous amount of work and dedication is poured into maintaining these ecosystems. Domestic spaces are also a private respite that in theory is unregulated in the way that a for profit agency is, although depending on your zip code this is often much more tenuous. In my old neighborhood people often sold roti, doubles, pone, currants rolls, drops, tamarind balls, toolum and a variety of snacks from their homes as a side hustle to make ends meet. So, the domestic space can also function as a site of direct or underground economic production to sustain a livelihood for residents.
EL: I’d like to talk a bit about the compositions of the spaces in these works. In my mind, I’m thinking about an approach to ‘construction’ that intentionally misuses or stretches certain tenants of architectural processes, in order to explore a different kind of fluidity and nuance to space that requires space be represented through a non-linear, embodied perspective. What kind of “architectural” planning goes into the preparation of these spaces for you? How are you thinking about architecture and construction? As I mentioned a moment ago, it as though, in viewing these works, we are falling or floating, more than we are standing or moving across a horizontal ground…Even when that horizontal perspective seems to appear, it quickly dissolves or is punctured by intersecting planes, some of which seem to resemble shards of glass...
SO: The planning of the compositions includes the use of sketches and digital/analogue collages. The source materials are primarily interior domestic spaces that very linear in their construction and presentation. The canvas acts as portal where I can construct visual spaces that are not bound by the demands that an actual room or a building would. This group of paintings did require being made booth on the floor and the wall, so they do impose their own limits and demands as objects in the process of being constructed. My use of stretching and compression are ways of thinking about the ways that a variety of natural and social forces are at play in the architecture already.
EL: Following up on my earlier question, I’m interested in the tension in these works between the process you employ of pouring paint, letting it pool and move like a living organism, while also engaging digital processes and methods of image transfer and alteration (even when the digital processes are preliminary and not directly evident in the paintings themselves). In this sense, there’s a sort of migration or mutation of material happening with your work. In addition to the process of pouring paint or of using your breath to blow ink onto the surfaces, can you talk about how you employ digital processes here, too? How do you think about the fluidity of the paint pouring versus more controlled, methodical processes that you incorporate? In other words, how do you navigate the tensions here between planning these spaces and the potential interruptions and divergences that the paint pours introduce?
SO: Well, the exhibition title “Leeway” has origins in the history of nautical and air navigation as a buffer zone that allows for a measure of drift downwind while still being on course. The term has been adopted to refer to the amount of freedom or wiggle room allowed within a given limit when performing an activity or making decisions. There is a phenomenon that occurs within digital spaces that seems limitless when your inside of them but the “everything all at once” also introduces more volatility in the present moment. My processes of moving between the plan and responding to divergences is an exploration of the materials that I have a lot of information about but in the process of using them I get to know them through my own sensory embodied experience. I become attuned to the rhythm and flow of having my plans interrupted and adjusting and acclimating my own expectations through the process. It’s my deliberate approach to regulating slow moving, viscous, precarious layers that momentarily relinquishes the hallmark of the brush while pouring paint directly from any vessel onto the canvas.
EL: It feels like there’s a parallel happening in the work between your uses of abstraction and certain kinds of obfuscation and the domestic setting of the bathroom, in the sense of it being such a private space within the home. You alluded to this before, in terms of your interest in these private spaces becoming less and less private as so much of life has expanded online, bringing about new kinds of visibility, giving us glimpses into strangers’ lives that we never before have had access to in such an intimate way. In the compositions of the work, there is a degree of concealment through the layers you build, but then there are flashes of stark visibility and legibility as objects are isolated and revealed (like the shelves in “Formally Tamed Curves” or the side-by-side toilets in “My Windpipe Cladded in Rare Earth”). Can you talk a bit about your interest in the relationships between private and public in the context of domestic space, and how you’re thinking about this dichotomy in these paintings?
SO: An erosion between the public and private creates an impression that there is a reversal but is more about the increased privatization of spaces and an attempt to strip away what is public while substituting it with publicity. It’s possible that an open floor plan troubles this dichotomy depending on their context. It’s possible that the proliferation of transparent walls permits more light to be let in as ultraviolet waves or the surveillance state. However fraught that might be, I’m constantly perplexed by how inventive people are at creating space where there is none.
EL: I keep thinking about architectural renderings and blueprints, and how intensely linear and rigid they are and how they are often modeled in relation to a false sort of “neutral” or “standard” figure. While there is so much more discourse now about designing for disabilities, and considered non-ableist forms of design, there still seems to be a “hard” science quality which dominates when we think of architecture—one that goes beyond materiality and into method and approach. This relates a bit to my question about regarding tension between movement of paint, but I’m curious how you’re thinking about the linearity of architectural spaces. There seems to be a lot of freedom, in terms of representation of space and interiors, happening in these works—but also something destabilizing, breaking apart perspective and ground. Can you talk a little about how you’re thinking about the lack of stability within the work? How are you thinking about the construction of spaces which are “Strained Beyond the Boundary of Topography” as one piece’s title suggests?
SO: The lack of stability does open some pathways of freedom within the visual space of the painting not that this is inherently enduring but that it reflects the general conditions on the ground. A lot of play and organization happens with the interaction of various visual components while making the work. I usually don’t think of my implementation of fluidity as an end goal in search of formlessness but using it in search of new formations that might emerge from the older fragments. I find immediate gratification in the geometric order of rectilinear forms to a degree but it’s a head space that often feels monocropped which is why modifying the visibility and aerating them with bubbles enhances their potential. I think about linearity in design and architecture that assumes a “standard” and I think about the process of it becoming as such, both in terms of the immense advantages of that assumption and the coercive operations that help to structure it as well. I wonder about the mental spaces that produces such designs, the bodies attached to them and the assumptions about how they take physical form in the world and how social space is considered in the process if at all. In my travels within the city, I assume that the visual projections that are made onto spatial fields in design and architecture are models that often try to accommodate bodily presence retroactively. Making a case for the presence of fluidity and energy flows where human activity is a central question seems pressing.
