bio/statement
Sally Scopa is a painter based in Bellingham, Washington. She has been awarded residencies at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, the Cité internationale des arts in Paris, France, and SOMA in Mexico City. Recent shows include a a solo booth with Oolong Gallery at Nada Miami 2024, a two-person exhibition at el Museo de la Ciudad (Querétaro, MX) with Carlos Vielma, as well as group exhibitions at 550 Gallery (New York) Ladies’ Room LA (Los Angeles) and Radio28 (Mexico City). She holds a BA in Visual and Environmental Studies from Harvard University and an MFA in Art Practice from Stanford University. She is originally from San Francisco, California.
For Scopa, painting brings about a heightened sense of stillness, a greater awareness of the body, and a rootedness in the here and now. Her work is an invitation to share in this state of focused attention. Her paintings take shape through a process of layering, sanding back down to excavate previous layers, and allowing decisions to accumulate intuitively, each in response to the one before.
Scopa’s paintings often have a shallow or artificial depth, almost like the simulated space of a game or a maze, inviting the feeling that a viewer could wander around inside and that a spirit of playful openness is enough to approach these works. Rube Goldberg machines, pre-cinema, aquariums, molecular diagrams of the human body and geographical strata all form starting points for her paintings which, through a process of slow tuning, gradually become abstract enough to hold many different associations.
Email: sallyscopa [at] gmail [dot] com
Instagram: @sally.scopa
Images of work courtesy of Rodrigo Gaya and Oolong Gallery.