Main Projects is pleased to present Close Company, an exhibition of paintings from Drea Cofield’s ongoing Selfie Project, on view October 8 through November 11 in The Library.
For the exhibition, Main Projects invited members of its Richmond community to submit selfies directly to Cofield. The resulting paintings appear alongside images contributed to the project from elsewhere, bringing friends, artists, collectors, acquaintances, and strangers into unusually close proximity. Some subjects are clothed, others nude; some appear alone in bedrooms, bathrooms, gardens, hotel rooms, or in front of mirrors. A phone is often visible, sometimes obscuring a face, sometimes acting as the point around which the entire picture is organized. What connects the images is a simple condition established by Cofield: each photograph must have been made by the person depicted.
That distinction is central to the project. Portraiture has traditionally depended upon a negotiation between sitter and artist, with the painter determining how another person enters the image. Cofield begins instead with a picture her subject has already authored. The pose, crop, setting, degree of exposure, and decision to be seen belong first to the sitter. Cofield’s act of painting does not eliminate that authorship so much as enter into conversation with it.
The Selfie Project, begun in 2012, emerged from Cofield’s thinking about agency, representation, and the painted figure. She invites consenting adults to submit photographs of themselves and translates selected images into small oil paintings on shellac-primed cardboard. Many are roughly the dimensions of the phones on which their source images might first have appeared. But almost everything else about their physical presence resists the logic of the screen.
A selfie can be produced, sent, enlarged, cropped, deleted, or forgotten within seconds. Cofield slows that image down. In paint, compressed digital information becomes color, pressure, drag, opacity, and touch. Photographic space loosens. A shadow becomes a field of blue or violet; skin dissolves into passages of orange, pink, brown, or green; a bedroom, bathroom, or restaurant booth can become as pictorially consequential as the person occupying it. The subject remains recognizable, but the photograph has ceased to function simply as information. It has become a painting.
This transformation links the Selfie Project to Cofield’s parallel practice of painting landscapes from observation. Plein-air painting teaches her to register changes in light, color, atmosphere, and spatial weight, while the selfies arrive as already flattened images. She approaches both, however, as problems of sustained looking. A body can be painted with the same attention given to a landscape: not as a collection of fixed contours, but as a shifting arrangement of temperature, light, pressure, and form. The history of portraiture remains present here, from the intimate scale of painted miniatures to the domestic interiors of Vermeer and the psychological isolation of Hopper, but filtered through one of the defining visual forms of contemporary life.
In Merin at Bathtime, a figure catches herself indirectly, partially obscured by the architecture of the room. The painting is as much about thresholds and interruptions as it is about likeness: mirror, doorway, wall, body, and reflection divide the small surface into competing spaces. Elsewhere, in Michael in Tunisia, the straightforward convention of a mirror selfie becomes almost confrontational through Cofield’s handling of saturated flesh, the blue of the room, and the horizontal interruption of the dresser. In both works, the camera records an instant, but painting gives that instant duration.
Other works push further into the strange visual vocabulary that selfies have produced. Bodies appear fragmented by mirrors, furniture, sheets, doorways, and phones. A pet may occupy the center of the image while its human subject recedes. A figure may be physically exposed yet visually inaccessible, hidden behind the device used to make the picture. These inversions complicate the assumption that a selfie is necessarily an act of straightforward self-display. To show oneself is not the same thing as surrendering control over how one is seen.
That tension becomes particularly acute in Close Company. Because many of the subjects belong to Richmond’s overlapping artistic and social communities, the encounter between viewer and image is potentially one of recognition rather than anonymity. Someone encountered first as paint may later be encountered at an opening, across a dinner table, or walking down the street. Conversely, a familiar person becomes newly strange when compressed into a small painted object and placed among strangers.
The title Close Company speaks to that condition. The exhibition is populated by people who are close in different ways: emotionally, socially, geographically, and pictorially. It also describes the unusual proximity required by the works themselves. Their scale asks viewers to approach. What might ordinarily be consumed instantly on a screen demands a slower and more bodily kind of attention.
For several works in the exhibition, Cofield has made ceramic frames and wall supports created during a residency in Spain. Glazed triangles, blocks, and fully articulated surrounds hold the paintings away from the neutrality of the gallery wall. Their handmade irregularity underscores the paintings’ transformation from digital file into physical thing. At moments they suggest frames, shelves, tiles, brackets, or small architectural fragments. They also introduce another register of touch: the image has not merely been painted, but given a body and a means of occupying space.
This material insistence is important to Cofield’s project. The selfie belongs to an image economy defined by circulation, speed, and disposability. Cofield does not reject that culture. She uses one of its most familiar forms as her raw material. But through painting she gives those images friction. The works retain the intimacy and immediacy of their sources while asking what happens when an image made quickly and often privately is translated into something slow, singular, and public.
In Close Company, that question becomes communal as well as personal. Looking is never entirely private here. The person who made the original photograph, the artist who translated it, and the viewer standing before the painting all occupy different positions within the same exchange. Cofield’s paintings allow those positions to remain unresolved. They are portraits, self-portraits, images of desire, records of ordinary life, and objects of sustained looking all at once.
About the Artist
Drea Cofield (b. 1986) is an artist living and working in Brooklyn, New York. Her practice spans portraiture, self-portraiture, and plein-air landscape painting and centers on questions of looking, embodiment, agency, consent, and the relationship between inner subjectivity and external reality.
Cofield is best known for her ongoing Selfie Project, begun in 2012, which brings the history of painted portraiture into dialogue with contemporary forms of digital self-representation. She has exhibited widely, including solo exhibitions with Kravets Wehby Gallery, Galleri Urbane, Soho Revue, and at Future Fair in New York. Her work has been featured in Playboy, CULTURED, The Wall Street Journal, The Brooklyn Rail, Dazed, and Contemporary Painting. She is the recipient of an Elizabeth Greenshields Grant and the Yale Gloucester Painting Prize, and has attended residencies including Lab of Experimental Art, Yaddo, Goldey House, and La Napoule Art Foundation. Cofield received her B.A. from DePauw University in 2008 and her M.F.A. from Yale School of Art in 2013.
