Wet Blanket features textiles that combine appliqué, quilting, painting, drawing, and embroidery into dense visual fields. In this recent body of work, Sonya Derman investigates and interrupts happiness cultures and positive psychology, considering the coercive forces of the nuclear social unit and the workplace-as-family. She develops a visual language that complicates associations between craft, domesticity, and comfort. As the artist stitches and layers representation, abstraction, and text, she finds freedom in the negative and in the potential of alternative relational structures.

Sonya Derman is a multidisciplinary artist based in New York City. Her recent work integrates drawing, painting, embroidery, appliqué, and writing into quilted visual fields. She holds an MA from the Royal College of Art in London. Derman has been awarded residencies atVermont Studio Center and Virginia Center for the Creative Arts; her recent exhibitions include a solo presentation at Sunview…