This page features works from Drea Cofield’s ongoing Selfie Project: ‘Send N*des’ series

ABOUT

"The landscape has always been a landing point for me, as a subject, as a metaphor for the body, a metaphor for a psychological space, and also a place on which to project desire," she says. The idea of the body as landscape characterizes the almost handheld-size, intimately scaled paintings on shellacked cardboard which she began making over a decade ago in graduate school. Each work is based on a photograph sent to her-originally an erotic nude snapped to give to a lover or keep for oneself.

Ideas of intimacy and exhibitionism are negotiated through the constellations of objects in interior spaces, almost always with a mirror, always with natural light that bathes both body and objects. "The play of light through the space and the intimacy in the play of things in the space in conversation with the body" becomes the province of Cofield's paintings, which act as prisms through which to refract notions of intangibility and representation, even as the individual intersects with the collective.

I make paintings from selfies people send me. They are not anonymous-the subjects who send me selfies understand the scope of my project. They choose how to represent themselves and they can decide whether or not they want to be named in the title of the painting made from their photo. The most compelling selfies are usually nudes or semi-nudes people have taken for themselves or lovers. I have chosen to curate this very first exhibition of this selfie series and title it S*nd Nudes, a phrase that originated as a request usually made by men to women on the Internet. Here, it solidly positions the paintings in relation to the nude as a subject in art history, while underscoring the methods I use to request images and what it means to be able to do so as an artist and as a woman.

Drea Cofield is an artist currently working in Brooklyn, NY. She has exhibited in the U.S. and internationally including New York, Dallas, Miami Los Angeles, and Italy with recent solo exhibitions at Galleri Urbane, October 2023, Untitled Miami, Galleri Urbane, DePauw University in Greencastle, IN, and Exeter Gallery in Baltimore, MD. Upcoming shows include Future Fair, NY solo booth presentation, Heaven Gallery in Chicago, IL and Library Street Collective in Detroit, MI. Her work has been featured in the Brooklyn Rail, Artnet News, Juxtapoz, and Contemporary Painting (World of Art). She is the recipient of an Elizabeth Greenshields Grant and the Yale Gloucester Painting Prize. Residencies include the Guild of Adventure Painters Mobile Residency in 2019 and a Yaddo Residency in Saratoga Springs, NY, in 2023. She is the Founder and Director of Bomb Pop-Up, a pop-up art and music initiative that focuses on providing visibility in exciting contexts to emerging and established artists and musicians. Cofield received her B.A. from DePauw University (Greencastle, IN) in 2008 and her M.F.A from Yale School of Art (New Haven, CT), in 2013.