The body of work in Sophie Treppendahl’s Homebody was inspired by her experience of the last two years. After having her life confined indoors, Treppendahl found she had fallen in love with being at home.
Treppendahl’s interior scenes are not aspirational clickbait. Instead, they are expressions of gratitude for the lived-in house: the clutter of a bathroom sink, the detritus of a dinner party, the surprise of light coming in through a window. These are homes that hold the weight of accumulated hours, bright colors of major and minor joys. A novelty mallard duck planter nests alongside family photos, a plant’s curious tendrils spread in front of a busy floral wallpaper.
Treppendhal pays homage to the painters who have influenced her by capturing the visual reality of how she encounters their work—through afternoons spent browsing art books, amid charging cables and cans of seltzer, takeout food and trinkets. Seen this way, a strange convergence takes place between the artists and the surrounding objects. Nested inside the larger canvas, they combine into a domestic plane, and create a snapshot of a painter at work.
The groove a couch shows after the five hundredth morning of continuous weight, a mug left on a table that one promises to pick up later. The distance between ourselves and our surroundings has collapsed. As a result, the works on display in Homebody can be understood as a collection of self-portraits. Treppendahl paints homes that function like a body, spaces that have become reflections–or extensions–of the self.
Homebody will run through June 18, 2022 at Johansson Projects in Oakland.
