Chapter NY is excited to present Souvenirs and Substitutions, Sofia Sinibaldi’s first solo exhibition with the gallery.

Synthesizing images through an additive process, Sinibaldi combines direct photography and scans to create a multiplicity of interrelated forms. During her commutes in New York City, she captures images with either a camera or a portable flatbed scanner that she applies directly against various surfaces. Her imperfect process of scanning three-dimensional objects prompts the loss of information, a distortion that causes the artist’s subjects to dissolve into abstraction. Like a distant memory, dream, or hallucination, they appear only vaguely discernable, grasped through feeling more than understanding.

For Souvenirs and Substitutions and her recent ongoing body of work, Sinibaldi prints her photographs and scans on tissue paper. Always on the verge of falling apart, this fragile membrane-like material gives body to her digital images, which she manually layers, turns, and reconfigures on a lightbox before arriving at a final multi-layered composition. Sinibaldi builds palpable surface tension by actively moving and directing the placement of her forms through multiple iterations. Inevitable tears and creases become another example of mark making that further reveal the wear of her hands-on method of mixing imagery. This visual condensation and suspension of imagery untethers her source material from its derived context, shedding preexisting narrative associations so that its contours become painterly gestures.

Stemming from the real world, Sinibaldi’s works elicit the interconnectivity of objects and motifs that exist within her surroundings. Manipulated through tactile engagement and filtered through her imagination, they hold the projection of an idea without a specific message. Sinibaldi provokes her audience to bring their own associations to her deconstructed montages that continually oscillate between legibility and abstraction. Not just about what is registered, but suggestive of that which is lost, her overlapping and bleeding forms leave the impression of afterimages stained into our minds.

Sofia Sinibaldi (b. 1992, Guatemala City) lives and works in New York. She received her BFA from San Francisco Art Institute in 2016. Sinibaldi has had solo exhibitions at Inge, Plainview, NY; Jack Hanley Gallery, New York; Interstate Projects, New York; and Y2K Gallery, San Francisco. Her work has been included in group and two-person exhibitions at Jack Hanley Gallery, New York; Pio Pico, Los Angeles; Gern en Regalia, New York; and Red Zone, Los Angeles; among others. In Fall 2024, Chapter NY will host a book launch for a new monograph, SPEEDBURN, published by SEVEN.