In This Skin: Sophie Cangelosi and Chelsea Ellis

Sophie Cangelosi and Chelsea Ellis utilize portrait-based techniques to explore notions of beauty and femininity. In her drawings and prints, Cangelosi depicts female bodies that are often turned away in profile, looking off into the distance or lost in contemplative thought. While her figures appear autonomous and uninhibited by the ostensible presence of an observer, they are connected by a strong emotional thread conveyed through intimate body language. The artist accentuates physical features with sharp outlines and acrid colors that imbue the figures with a hyper-real physicality and expressive power. 

Ellis traces the female form – her own – by painting and photographing her body, and then digitally altering the images into gestural fragments. An eye, the chin, a mouth - body parts have been extracted and transformed into evocative abstractions that appear as ritual objects or ancient relics. Any personal resemblances to the artist’s features have been stripped away to reveal a life-force that has materialized into an element primordial and sublime.

Sophie Cangelosi is a multi-disciplinary visual artist with experience in illustration, graphic design, hand lettering, and mural installation. Cangelosi explores themes of perception, impermanence, femininity, inner-life, and identity by using graphic, figurative, and abstract forms. She graduated from Maine College of Art with her BFA in Illustration in 2016, and has exhibited her work in a number of locations throughout the United States, most recently at Seven Sisters in Portland, Oregon. Cangelosi lives in Portland, Maine.

Chelsea Ellis is a photographic and digital artist who grew up in Maine and lives in Portland. Her most recent work portrays the arrival of a strong sense of self during a moment of personal anxiety and transition. She received her BA in Photography from the University of Southern Maine in 2012. Ellis currently has work at the Harlow Gallery's 23rd annual juried art exhibition in Hallowell, Maine.