Sonya Merutka
Sonya Merutka
Sonya Merutka; Freckle Rubbing, 2022 and Sun Rubbing, 2022; Oil pastel and pen on paper; 11 x 8.5 in., each
Sonya Merutka; Freckle Rubbing, 2022; Oil pastel and pen on paper; 11 x 8.5 in.
Sonya Merutka; Sun Rubbing, 2022; Oil pastel and pen on paper; 11 x 8.5 in.
Sonya Merutka; Sun Rubbing, 2022; Oil pastel and pen on paper; 11 x 8.5 in.
Sonya Merutka; Hip Rubbing, 2022; Oil pastel and pen on paper; 11 x 8.5 in.
FRECKLE RUBBING, SUN RUBBING, HIP RUBBING
A rubbing is an impression made by pressing a material, such as paper, against the elevations and depressions of a surface with a tool that will mark that trace. Frottage, or rubbing, is the technique that makes the imprint of a material’s varying terrain. The three works exhibited here are part of an ongoing series of rubbings that bring together the mapping of physical form, such as the body, with annotations from memory. They are an attempt to depict the fluctuation of the material and immaterial between friends and lovers, as well as the way memory works to suspend and loop time.
I started this series in an effort to picture the topography of my listening by marking the friction between paper, pastel, and my ear; this was sent by various means to a friend whose grief rang across the US and Mexico in 2021. The subsequent works, exhibited here, follow queer intimacies and erotics over multiple geographies, signposting place and time with minor footnotes that round the page.
The rubbings are made legible through this text that requires turning to read it linearly—mimicking the movements performed to make the rubbings. Freckle Rubbing illustrates a flat tattoo, impossible to map the texture of, made by stick-and-poke in a backyard down the road from Tennessee’s Smoky Mountains. Sun Rubbing was made lying down on a friend’s couch and skips back through ten years of friendship from Los Angeles to a rainy night in Boston. Hip Rubbing, yellow pastel on hot pink paper, recalls rose-colored hickeys, the lights at 169 Bar in New York City, and traces the surface of romance and gay date spots.
BIO
Sonya Merutka is a New York-based writer and artist who uses text, photography, and mixed media to consider memory, mapping, and attachment, especially as they relate to queer erotics of the crush and the toils of falling in love. As a Helena Rubinstein Fellow in Critical Studies at the Whitney Independent Study Program, their work engages queer performance practice, crip theory, and semiotics. Sonya received their master’s degree from NYU in Performance Studies, Certificate in Photography from Ostkreuzschule Berlin, and bachelor’s degree in Feminist Philosophy and Visual Culture from UC Santa Cruz. Dedicated to the study and publishing of queer and trans authors, they are the founder of Subtext, a queer theory reading group and community-based education forum for critical queer studies, which began in Berlin in 2015. They also serve as the Performance Reviews Editor at Women & Performance: a journal of feminist theory and are a member of Queer Detainee Empowerment Project in New York.
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