For over a decade, Sabrina Piersol has analyzed the Sapphic fragment—an exploration of palette as poem that blossoms into luminous abstract paintings charged with aura. Informed by a phenomenology of presence and absence, Piersol’s practice moves between the explicit vastness of the natural world and the implicit, charged space of the void.

In her debut New York exhibition at Jack Barrett, Piersol gathers this accumulated technical prowess and conceptual elasticity to tackle one of the more ineffable subjects: the cloud.

Fickle and ephemeral, clouds have carried symbolic weight across millennia, anchoring ancient myth, political allegory, and the everyday haunt of quixotic dreamers. They also, in plain terms, make and mark the weather. There are no clean binaries for Piersol here. Cirrus, cumulus, and stratus collapse into one another through infinite gradations: from the low drag of nimbostratus to the ripples of cirrocumulus, dappled high, pulling off the greatest trick of all: the sublime sunset that stuns just about everyone, from Ovid to the slack-jawed, shroomy kids of the Rocky Mountains.

No matter the type, clouds only form when air is cooled below its dew point. Like everything else in life, vapor particles have their limit, when they have simply had enough and transform into something new.

Sparked by a long autumn in Colorado—an extended season of nature’s grief where rebirth feels imprisoned—Outside Your Cloud explores the dew point: a threshold of transformation where accumulation tips into change, holding within it both the granular and the grandiose, the microscopic and the macroscopic.

Across the eleven paintings, Piersol sustains a peripheral vision that both atomizes and coheres into a flow state. While varied visually, each painting can be read as a meditation on atmosphere, formed through sustained looking during a snowless Southwest winter. The Milagros, folk charms carried, kept, and returned to, enter the work as a point of focus, alongside rabbitbrush, a sage-like plant that dynamically transforms across seasons from pollinating softness to dried, sculptural form, holding the illusion of permanence within a thing in flux. 

Departing from her storied palette of pinks and oranges, Outside Your Cloud adopts a restrained range of blue, yellow, and the emulsified ingredients of white. With the tenderness of a poet and the meticulous gaze of a technician, Outside Your Cloud plays both a spiritual and a practical register. Piersol assures herself and the viewer that the present — that cloud you’re in — can, and always will, hold change.

–Tess Gruenberg