Location: 2277 Monitor Street, Dallas, Texas, 75207
Galleri Urbane is pleased to announce ‘Wish You Were Here’, a solo exhibition of the latest works by Brooklyn based artist Drea Cofield. This represents the artist’s second solo exhibition at the gallery. Meet the artist on January 10th from 5:00 - 7:00pm.
An essay by writer Eve Hill-Agnus accompanies the exhibition.
Wish You Were Here brings together two seemingly traditional genres—landscape and portraiture—in a manner that is both confidential and open. It features small-format plein-air paintings made during a year of far-flung travel alongside new works from Cofield’s ongoing Selfie Project, in which participants send her nude selfies, images of intimacy and unveiling from which she paints. In Cofield’s hands, these “conventional” forms reveal themselves as open systems, porous to joy, vulnerability, and the politics of looking.
The title Wish You Were Here signals her tone and intention from the outset. A postcard valence— casual, affectionate, lightly cheeky—coexists with the deeper emotional registers that run through the work. Postcards are gestures across distance, invitations to imagine shared space; a nude selfie, in its own vernacular, effectuates something similar. Both are messages sent across thresholds, carrying a desire to be seen, to be known, to be met again in the future. Cofield locates her practice in this charged zone between longing and visibility, between looking and being looked at.
During a year when the artist roamed, traveling in France, New Mexico, Hawaii, Alaska, Indiana, and the East Coast, the plein-air paintings’ supports—shellack-primed cardboard historically used for landscape studies—suited a nomadic rhythm. They also contain the marks of where she stood: bits of debris or sand, particles gathered while the paint was still wet. What unfolds in these paintings is a sensuous record of color, atmosphere, and immediacy. Each horizon line reflects Cofield’s literal vantage point: her height, her body’s orientation in space, her decisions in real time.
These same qualities—speed, touch, perceptual specificity—charge the Selfie Project. The selfies Cofield receives carry their own atmospheres—incandescent glow, neon glint, outdoor glimmer—and these chromatic cues nourish her landscapes anew. The two bodies of work mingle, informing one another’s palette, temperature, and sense of place.
Both series also interrogate the gaze, questioning who detains power in acts of representation. In the Selfie Project, Cofield repositions the role of the artist altogether: rather than staging or directing, she collaborates; rather than asserting mastery, she creates conditions for vulnerability. This redistribution of authority is also a feminist strategy, resting solidly on nonhierarchical authorship. Cofield’s approach invites others in.
This space of consent, trust, and shared agency produces panels that range from Babe in the Woods, in which a male nude basks in nature, to Villa Window Self Portrait (France), where plein-air and self- portrait sensibilities merge, the vectors of domesticity and exteriority crossing, confounding the locus of safety and comfort.
Despite their familiarity as genres, Cofield’s works ask us to reconsider what is overlooked in the everyday: the habitual way we consume selfies, the way we take for granted our own position when looking at the world. In Cofield’s work, the gaze becomes embodied, specific, and reciprocal. The landscapes are not generic vistas but records of looking; the selfies are not digital flotsam but moments of self-definition. Both insist on the richness available when one truly sees—and is willing to be seen.
Wish You Were Here thus becomes an invitation: to view the world and each other with more attunement; to feel the emotional heat of moments shared across distance; to inhabit, even briefly, the generosity at the heart of Cofield’s practice. In her hands, the conventional becomes newly alive, transformed into a space where desire, perception, and agency coexist with an uncommon clarity.
.d093a094a9f629e00de6694c52c06eb35107.png)
