Sarah Shepard Gallery is pleased to announce Understory, In Blue, a solo exhibition of Hungarian-American artist Dora Somosi’s lens-based work, in collaboration with 3walls, a Brooklyn-based art advisory and pop-up gallery that seeks out local, emerging artists. The exhibition features a collection of cyanotypes produced from digital negatives captured at the homes and studios of influential female artists and thinkers, along with four unique hand-embroidered cyanotypes from Somosi’s Mending series. The prints present bewitching, blue trees, which act as surrogate subjects for the women who once reveled in their beauty. With the trees as witness to each respective woman’s greatness and creativity, Somosi’s cyanotypes transcribe, honor, and memorialize that fleeting and intimate testimony, becoming mnemonic devices of a great mind: a great woman.
Somosi’s “photographic blueprints,” as she calls them—a literal and allegorical reference to color, ideology, and the technical trace of shape and space captured by a cyanotype—bear witness to the legacies of women such as Agnes Martin, Ana Mendieta, Anni Albers, Edith Heath, Emily Dickinson, Helen Frankenthaler, and Ruth Asawa. The series began in Austerlitz, New York at Edna St. Vincent Millay’s home, known as Steepletop. Steepletop, and the surrounding natural environment—including 31 White Pine trees planted by Millay in honor of her mother—epitomizes the type of deep kinship with nature shared by the women featured in Understory, In Blue. Throughout 2022, amidst the COVID-19 pandemic, Somosi took intimate walks along the grounds of these hallowed homes, imagining conversations with these women, considering how they may have walked along the same streams and paths and gazed upon the same trees. Somosi also conducted thorough research into the subjects’ family lives, contemporaries, oeuvre, and biographies, which inherently informed her striking “blueprints,” therefore contributing to a conversation on the natural world and womanhood.
Understory, In Blue builds upon Somosi’s lens-based practice of capturing the everyday sublime as manifested in nature. Somosi—a self-proclaimed “visual wanderer”—became deeply connected to and grounded by nature in the face of personal health issues, turning to the “quiet magnificence of our natural world” for inspiration and introspection. Photography allows Somosi to uniquely index, or capture, the physicality of this “quiet magnificence,” along with her own condition as the maker. Somosi’s interest in cyanotypes—a laborious, measured 19th century photographic printing process—began in 2021, and emphasizes her dedication to intentionality and process.
A handful of inevitably imperfect cyanotypes gain a second life in Somosi’s Mending series, four of which are featured in Understory, In Blue. Somosi reinvents these cyanotypes using double exposure and hand-dyed, hand-sewn embroidered elements. Embroidery, integral to Mending, reflects a tradition deeply rooted in Hungarian folk art, where women expressed creativity, identity, and connection through intricate patterns on household textiles and festive attire. This craft served as both storytelling and community-building, passed through generations, and resonates in Somosi’s labor-intensive approach to repairing cyanotypes. Equally inspired by the Japanese art of Kintsugi—celebrating beauty in repair—Somosi hand-stitches dyed threads into her cyanotypes, further drawing on embroidery’s historical role as a medium of expression and resilience, especially among women. These pieces echo a continuum of women’s creativity, linking cultural tradition to the broader themes of nature, womanhood, and legacy explored in her work.
Through Somosi’s reverence for mark-making, careful seeing and thinking, and artistic process, Understory, In Blue offers a consequential veneration for the enormously important work and ideas pioneered by the women featured. The low, sky-turned perspective of Somosi’s arboreal images—limbs outstretched, canopies shifting with the seasons—creates a staggering, nearly overwhelming composition, embodying the magnitude of these women’s contributions. Rendered in dreamy, melancholic, veracious blues, Somosi’s trees are equally entrancing and empowering, a true testament to the women who once stood under and beside them.
Dora Somosi is a Hungarian-American lens-based artist living and working in Brooklyn and upstate New York. Her work has been shown widely at such venues as Klompching Gallery, Sarah Shepard Gallery, Carrie Haddad Gallery, The International Center of Photography (ICP), Center for Contemporary Printmaking, Penumbra Foundation, Bolinas Art Museum, and the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Her photographs have been published in The Atlantic, The New York Times, T Magazine, and elsewhere. Somosi’s works are part of collections of notable New York and Los Angeles collectors and interior designers, including Trustees of the Brooklyn Museum, BRiC Arts, and the Brooklyn International Studio and Curatorial Program.
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