The artist methodically catalogues how her faith – in humanity and in God – unravelled after her stint at a tech company
Sophia Giovannitti once worked at a tech company where her boss found her body more valuable than her brain. In fact, what he wanted more than her intellectual labour was her sexual labour. After she agreed to take on extra shifts as his escort, however, he extorted her, failing to pay her appropriately for the work she performed, contorting her understanding of authority along the way. Like Judas, he broke bread with her before the eventual betrayal.
This duplicity is what first threw Giovannitti into a crisis of faith, she tells us in Does it have a sincere relationship to God? (2024), a live lecture staged on Thursday and Friday nights inside her first exhibition at Blade Study (everything in You know I got it So come and get it is part of a larger work titled Crisis of Faith, 2022–2024). When there is no lecture, visitors can mingle in the gallery, where an installation titled Toby Tony Toni Me and God (2024) includes glass terrariums in which caterpillars are going through metamorphosis and a three-channel video that loops on screens around the room. The first channel displays the music video for country singer Toby Keith’s Should Have Been a Cowboy (1993), the second a clip of an episode from the first and fourth seasons of The Sopranos (1999–2007) and the third a cut of Alexandra Weltz and Andreas Pichler’s documentary, Antonio Negri: A Revolt that Never Ends (2004). But it’s only after listening to the two-hour lecture that one comes to understand what Giovannitti wants to say.
Throughout her slide presentation, Giovannitti locks eyes with viewers in her intentionally limited audience of 12 as she methodically catalogues how her faith – in humanity and in God – unravelled after her stint at the tech company. After leaving that job and deciding the nine-to-five was not for her, she published a memoir called Working Girl: On Selling Art and Selling Sex (2023), about making art in New York while supporting herself through sex work. In her lecture, she tells us that after Working Girl came out she started wearing baggy clothes instead of revealing ones, as she found exposing her body in the everyday context, when she’d already exposed herself as someone who sells her body, redundant. To demonstrate her point, Giovannitti unhangs a pair of baggy shorts and a T-shirt from the gallery wall and changes, without fanfare, into the outfit in front of her audience.
As the lecture progresses, we find out where Giovannitti found her faith again: in Toby Keith, whose music video plays in the periphery while the artist speaks. Keith, a country star, was characterised during his lifetime as a George W. Bush conservative. Throughout her performance, Giovannetti insists that she has a “sincere relationship” to Keith’s music, as well as to other trappings of rural America, and that she, to borrow the musician’s lyrics, “should have been a cowboy”. This show, we begin to realise, is personal, but it attempts to situate itself within a political context. Namely, one that is interested in reframing traditional fixtures of American rightwing culture, such as country music, as radically progressive. While it certainly took tenacity and a firm sense of self for Giovannitti to continue practising a profession in which she once faced financial exploitation and precarity, one wonders if her newfound identification with the ‘cowboy’ and country music stems from a fantasy of a gendered role-reversal. Given the difficulties of being a woman in the world today, the artist seems more comfortable resigning to escapism than fighting those inclined to disrespect her.
While recognising the perhaps impossible nature of the attempt, Giovannitti uses Does it have a sincere relationship to God? to try to get ahead of the critics whose both flattering and reductive reviews of her memoir she invokes in her lecture. Giovannitti’s show is ultimately an exploration of what happens when an artist purposely generates analysis and discourse around their work. Like a memoirist, an artist can manage and mould the narrative of their lived experience, but as this show suggests, the process invariably offers only one version of a story, for viewers to evaluate however they wish.
You know I got it So come and get it at Blade Study, New York, 6 June – 7 July
