Soft Exchanges

Drea Cofield

17th September - 31st October

Soho Revue is pleased to present a solo exhibition by Drea Cofield, ‘Soft Exchanges’. The works continue a legacy as part of a much larger project which began in 2012, entitled, ‘ Send Me Your Selfies’. Inspired by selfies submitted by consenting adults, Cofield began painting the series. At once intimate and mediated, the works explored how digital images - especially nude or vulnerable ones - are shaped by technologies of looking, desire, and control. In ‘Soft Exchanges’, Cofield seeks to continue to manipulate technologies of looking, changing the perception of the image through slow, physical translation into paint. In doing so, the viewer is asked to assess how each portrait reclaims presence and complexity, and how the question of female agency is answered in today’s modern world.

With each sitter subverting the traditional art historical canon in the role of the observed, by being at once the author of the photograph too, there seems to be a precedent set already that these subjects have more agency than usual. In being the ones taking the photo, and then actively submitting it to the artist, there is a level of control present that is not usually found in depictions of the female nude. Further still, in the physical translation into paint, in the slowing down of depiction, there is a pause which allows tender exploration and a humble understanding of our mutual desire to look and to be seen.

Alongside these reclamations of power, there is also an alternative offering in the ways of seeing female bodies, that steps away from the hyper glamourised and pristine images we see in popular media. Cast away are the glossy pictures of a woman atop a manicured beach or spotless bedroom; in Drea’s submitted images there is a toothbrush charger still plugged in a tile bathroom wall and a messy kitchen table is covered in fabrics seen through a mirror askew, which lends a sense of reality, and time and place to these women.

The complex dualities of how these women see themselves can be observed in the snippets of how each sitter’s body is positioned. Sometimes a back is arched in pleasure as in ‘Red Panties’, or breasts pushed forwards in ‘Alex in Pink’ , signalling a performance- or perhaps real - pleasure for the camera, other times the depictions oscillate towards softer approaches, an unapologetic stance in ‘Emerald Silk’, a body in repose in ‘In the Bath’. The duality of the female body, as one that is not always sexualised, and can sometimes simply be, emerges.