Charles Atlas

Sojourner Truth Parsons

Please join us to celebrate the opening of CAG's fall 2025 exhibitions: [*Sojourner Truth Parsons: Louise*](/exhibition/sojourner-truth-parsons) and [*Charles Atlas: Hail the New Puritan*](/exhibition/charles-atlas).

All ages welcome. Cash bar.

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Fall 2025

Opening Reception

For more than ten years now, the paintings of Sojourner Truth Parsons have trafficked in the saturated and sensorial. Plumbing the space between abstraction and legibility, feeling and form, the language of Parsons’ work is an intuitive one. Building depth through accretion, collapsing interior and exterior realms, and traversing a shifting set of references — from the history of dance to the Gee’s Bend quilts of Alabama to her garden in the Catskill Mountains — her paintings give shape to intensities both atmospheric and embodied. 

*Louise* brings together a selection of works produced by the Vancouver-born, New York-based artist over the past several years, surveying the dexterity of her movement between figuration and form and her canvases’ elemental approach to sensation, texture and tone. Titled after the work of poet Louise Glück — known for her decades-long meditation on the illusions and agonies of the self — the exhibition traces the enduring emotional registers, both individual and collective, that occupy Parsons’ time in the studio: desire, loss, isolation, redemption, resurgence.

#### Biography
Sojourner Truth Parsons (b. 1984, Vancouver) lives and works in New York and the Southern Catskill Mountains. Her recent solo exhibitions include Pilar Corrias, London; Esther Schipper, Berlin; Foxy Production, New York; Various Small Fires, Seoul; The Journal Gallery, New York; and Oakville Galleries, Canada. Recent group exhibitions include *Painting Energy: The Alex Katz Painting Foundation Collection*, Portland Museum of Art; *The New Bend*, curated by Legacy Russell, Hauser & Wirth, New York, Los Angeles & Somerset; *Downbeat*, Marian Goodman Gallery, New York; *Springweather and people*, Bortolami, New York; and *This is America*, Kunstraum Potsdam. Parsons was artist in residence at Denniston Hill; the Santa Fe Art Institute; The Rooms, Newfoundland; and the Ross Creek Center for the Arts, Bay of Fundy. Among other collections, her work is held by the Long Museum, Shanghai; Montreal Museum of Fine Arts; Museum Voorlinden, Wassenaar; National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa; Portland Museum of Art; Royal Bank of Canada; and the Vanhaerents Art Collection, Brussels.

Exhibition material

Large print exhibition material

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Louise

Charles Atlas has been a leading figure in film and video for more than fifty years. Known for his relentlessly innovative engagements with genre, technology and form, the New York-based artist has pushed at the boundaries of moving images from the earliest moments of his career, when he was filmmaker-in-residence at the Merce Cunningham Dance Company. In the decades since, Atlas has honed an expansive practice that bridges moving images, installation, theatre, and performance, achieving widespread acclaim for his pioneering films and videos and his landmark collaborations with artists such as Yvonne Rainer, Marina Abramović and Ahnoni and the Johnsons. 

At the Contemporary Art Gallery, Atlas presents *Hail the New Puritan* (1985–86), an "anti-documentary" that follows Scottish dancer and choreographer Michael Clark in a highly stylized day-in-the-life as he and his company prepare for a performance. Shot in the thriving queer, punk and post-punk countercultures of 1980s East London — with appearances from figures such as Leigh Bowery and Mark E. Smith of The Fall — *Hail the New Puritan* toes the tenuous boundary between fantasy and reality, capturing a dazzling culture of self-fashioning and world-making, and the potent energies of a rapidly shifting social landscape. 

#### Biography
Charles Atlas (b. 1949, St. Louis, MO) has lived and worked in New York City since the early 1970s. In 2024, the ICA Boston presented *About Time*, the first U.S. museum survey devoted to Atlas’ work. Other recent solo exhibitions include *The Mathematics of Consciousness*, a 100-foot long video installation commissioned by Pioneer Works, Brooklyn, NY (2022); *Charles Atlas: Ominous, Glamorous, Momentous, Ridiculous*, Fondazione ICA Milano, Italy (2021); and *Charles Atlas: The past is here, the futures are coming* and *The Kitchen Follies*, The Kitchen, New York (2018). Atlas’ work is included in the permanent collections of major institutions worldwide, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Art Institute of Chicago; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Tate Modern, London; Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; Hamburger Bahnhof – Museum für Gegenwart, Berlin; Migros Museum für Gegenwartskunst, Zürich; and De Hallen Haarlem, The Netherlands. In 2024, Atlas’ archive was acquired by The Getty Research Institute.

#### Acknowledgements
*Charles Atlas: Hail the New Puritan* is generously supported by Claudia Beck.

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