The Valley is pleased to present Land of Rest, Sophia Heymans’ third solo exhibition with the gallery, and her first at The Valley’s location in Santa Fe. 

In her paintings, Heymans works with a non-dominant perspective and integrates figures into the landscape. Drawing from her own reference images and from her memory, she builds up the contours of landforms and bodies of water with natural materials such as prairie grass seeds and moss, melding them to her canvas with molding paste and acrylic gel medium. By foregrounding the land both conceptually and materially, Heymans’ paintings propose an inverse of the hierarchy typically conveyed by historical American landscape paintings. 

The landscape is more than a stage where the drama of humankind is performed. It is an orchestra, a chorus, a marching band – thousands of constituent parts working in collaboration, many too small to see. Foregrounding the agency of non-human living things, Heymans seeks to remind viewers how crucial our relationship with the land is. Our environment nurtures, sustains, and shapes us. Even while we neglect and harm it, the land and water respond to us. We are in constant conversation with the natural world around us. 

The paintings in this exhibition are iterations on reclining figures in the landscape. In Western art history, this pose often connotes power, wealth, and status. To be depicted at rest is conferred on humans with these privileges or those under their care. In contrast to this trope, Heymans does not present a single centrally oriented figure, but rather, multiple figures in various states of repose are dense within her compositions. In place of plush pillows and silken sheets, Heymans’ figures are lounging as if forged by tectonic shifts and melting ice sheets. They are born out of the shadows between rocks and glimpsed in the rapids of a river. The figures recline in these wild worlds unabashed, as if in the privacy of their own bedrooms. Pastures, canyons, and riverbeds host a sleepover. Open to all, the landscape cradles human bodies with care and intimacy while they daydream, lounge, lean, sunbathe, and float.

Working primarily from photos and memories of locations the artist has visited in Northern New Mexico and the Rocky Mountains, Heymans’ utopic visions in Land of Rest remind us of our need for grounding. In rest, in community, and in connection with the land.