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LZ: Can you unpack the appeal of being inviting and hospitable through paintings? As a person or as an artist?
SS: Sure. I think it’s just about wanting to have an experience of relation or conversation through my paintings, rather than completely mystifying people or having a visual “monologue.” I don’t think too much about a generalized viewer when painting, but I always want to be honest about why I make the art: it helps me figure out how to be a person in the world and it brings me joy. I never want to obscure those essential reasons for making, which are always stronger than any given subject matter. I think viewers might identify with those needs for joy and the processing of experience and feel that the art speaks to them for those reasons.
LZ: How are you thinking about text in the works? Specifically, the indecipherable letters in Horizontal History and the direct text in Welcome to the Pleasure Archipelago (Oh, Yes).
SS: Horizontal History is about what it means to be intimate with someone. It’s a painting that
asks, “What is the actual act that counts as sex or, more broadly, intimacy?” The initials in this
piece do not represent everyone I’ve actually slept with, it's actually just everyone who I’ve laid
down with, literally been horizontal with. It was an exercise I did for myself, so it feels separate
from the other pieces in the show. I was thinking about Tracey Emin’s tent piece.
LZ: Yes, I was about to say. I love how Emin’s piece, Everyone I Have Ever Slept With, plays with
the language of that phrase. It makes us think about what sleeping with someone means literally versus how it’s used colloquially.
SS: Absolutely. Horizontal History and that whole body of work with the “Oh, Yes,” was
happening right after the 2022 Roe v. Wade decision. I wanted to be more explicit than I might
normally be. Text was a part of that. Within those two paintings, I was thinking about pushing it as a painter, asking myself why I don't ever include text, and questioning how text would limit interpretations of the work or enrich it. For “Oh, Yes,” I'm happy that text is there. I wanted to do something kind of silly, but also celebratory of having a woman's body, because it wasn’t feeling great in that moment.
LZ: I’m curious about your approach to groupings and smaller bodies of work. In the show,
there’s Winter, Summer, Spring, notably no Fall. Couple is made up of two paintings but titled as one. And then there's Bridge and Raft, which seem to be different places on the same river, if
read figuratively. There are a lot of partnerships and pairings.
SS: Yes, I need to add Fall. Maybe Fall will be totally different. The other works you mention are
definitely about partnership. I think many of these paintings need partners. There’s a tension in that because the question becomes, oh, but then do they stand alone, or do they need their partner? That's the question I sometimes ask about my paintings and other people's paintings and then of course about myself. There’s an exploration of dependency or reliance in this work. Maybe that anthropomorphizes the paintings too much, but I think it’s there.
LZ: In Winter, Summer, Spring, I see a portrayal of a sexual encounter within a relationship.
There’s a certain amount of distance presented between the volcano and the figure, but that
space between them feels charged. Maybe it’s because the eruption is framed by legs in each
painting, also evoking a sense of multiple potential outcomes.
SS: I felt like those were important pieces to make and opened up the rest of the content that I wanted to explore. I think you've helped me realize that in those pieces, I was already exploring that content: ideas of wanting independence alongside togetherness, thoughts about how cyclical we are as beings, and of course as women. I often wonder if the fixed structure within which we conceive of many relationships can accommodate cyclical human emotions and body cycles, whether they are monthly or whether they take several years? There’s such a linear structure in general to relationships in our culture, when, in reality, everyone is just this completely cyclical individual. I think a lot about how to reconcile my cyclical self to the forward marching of the world.
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