Recording (How It Makes Me Feel)
Recording (How It Makes Me Feel)
Toussaint Rosefort and Maria Ivancsics
Curated by Kate Sherman
August 6th, 2026 - August 30th, 2026
Field of Play is pleased to present Recording (How It Makes Me Feel), a two-person exhibition of work by Toussaint Rosefort and Maria Ivancsics.
During visits to their respective studios, both Rosefort and Ivancsics attested to taking a phenomenological view of their lives – that is, to consider closely their own consciousnesses as they are affected by (and affect) the events that play out around them. For both, it seems to be understood that there is no neutral and empirical reality, and that our realities are inextricably intertwined with our feelings. There is no divide between inside and the outside, or between emotion and matter; our emotions are the matter of which our lives consist.
Rosefort’s Quelle Porte from 2021 is made up of seven stripes of color and 6 stripes of white. The composition references the 1957 film Funny Face, wherein a high-powered fashion magazine executive enters her office through a double door painted black, surrounded by six single doors of blue, red, yellow, lilac, orange, and green. Stripped of its cinematic origin, Quelle Porte is ripe for a galaxy of relational interpretations – it looks like SMPTE color bars, or a piano, or a Calibrite color checker. Quelle Porte leans on its identity as a painting as a source of simplification. Rosefort deftly layers interrelated meanings into work that is deceivingly elemental, producing the effect of an almost after-image of understanding. Mom and Dad (American Gothic) (2026), an installation of two pieces of sewn fabric hung on steel bars, further exemplifies Rosefort’s interest in recording the sensations of his world. Mom, the lilac fabric, hangs light and flowing, while Dad hangs stiff and turgid, its bars boxier and its fabric thicker than that of its counterpart. Drawing from his sensory memories of time with his parents, Rosefort arranges worldly materials to approximate a physical record of the feelings left behind.
Doorways, thresholds, and calibration (both emotional and visual) also animate Maria Ivancsics’s paintings, through a logic that relates to, but also differs from Rosefort’s poetic attribution of significance. Good Bar 3 is a square painting with a slanted red bar across the top fourth of the picture plane. An absolutely kinetic slew of oily, semi-translucent brushwork washes over the entire painting, save for a collection of thick blobs of bright color in the left-center. These colorful dots are legible as refracted light, contextualized by a lamp or bulb to their right. However, as representations of light, one would think that they would be made with a lighter touch, in order to keep with the understanding of light affecting objects, not the other way around. Instead, Ivancsics challenges this and other conventions – choosing instead to render areas to different levels of clarity, and permitting the gleam of oil to fill the space of the image, suffusing the very air of the room depicted with fluid motion. Ivancsics employs oil paint as both a marker of sight and signifier of sensation. In Myrtle Wyckoff (2025), Ivancsics again demonstrates the rigor of their approach to gestural, dimensional painting. Painted from the angle of staring down at the tracks on the elevated L/M line, Myrtle Wyckoff orients the viewer to Ivancsic’s exact height, position, and – to those paying attention – state of mind.
Working across different media and drawing from distinct personal experiences, Rosefort and Ivancsics find common ground in the pursuit of transmuting moments of felt-time into visual records of emotion and understanding.
ARTIST BIOS
Toussaint Rosefort (b. 1994) is a multidisciplinary artist and designer living and working in New York. His practice is process oriented, spanning installation, sculpture, and painting, often incorporating found objects. He centers his work around observation, research, and self discovery, producing an abstracted reflection of physical and social landscapes that he has moved through while also addressing the past which has led to the current state of the world as he knows it. Toussaint’s artistic sensibility was first drawn and nourished by his aunt and uncle who are artists themselves. It continued to flourish throughout his studies at Parsons and the Art Students League, while also drawing from his B.A. in Political Science, which heavily influences his work and the subject matter it is based on. He has exhibited internationally at institutions such as Darb 1718 in Egypt, The Cape Cod Museum of Art in Massachusetts, and Sabroso Projects in Puerto Rico and has been featured in publications such as Paper Magazine, Hypebeast and Esquire. Toussaint maintains ties with multiple artist communities, assisting other well-known artists and brands to incorporate his unique style and artistic viewpoint. In September he has an upcoming residency at Ma’s House in Southampton NY, and has done prior residencies at Estudio Arriba Abaja in Old San Juan, Puerto Rico and Chateau d'Orquevaux in France.
Maria Ivancsics was born 2001 in South Bend, IN. They received their BFA in 2023 from Indiana University, Bloomington. They are currently based in Ridgewood, Queens and are pursuing their MFA at Hunter College.