Sophia Giovannitti: Be the cowboy

The artist methodically catalogues how her faith – in humanity and in God – fell apart after her stint at a technology company

Sophia Giovannitti once worked at a technology company where her boss valued her body more than her brain. In fact, what he wanted more than her intellectual labor was her sexual labor. After she agreed to additional shifts as his escort, however, he extorted her, failed to pay her properly for the work she did, and twisted her sense of authority along the way. Like Judas, he broke bread with her before the ultimate betrayal.

This duplicity is what first led Giovannitti into a crisis of faith, she tells us in Does it have a genuine relationship with God? (2024), a live lecture held on Thursday and Friday evenings at her first exhibition at Blade Study (all in You know I have it, so come and get it. is part of a larger work entitled Crisis of faith, 2022–2024). When there is no lecture, visitors can mingle in the gallery, where an installation entitled Toby Tony Toni Me and God (2024) features glass terrariums in which caterpillars undergo metamorphosis and a three-channel video looping on screens around the room. The first channel shows the music video for country singer Toby Keith’s Should have been a cowboy (1993), the second a fragment of an episode from the first and fourth seasons of The Sopranos (1999–2007) and the third a version of the documentary by Alexandra Weltz and Andreas Pichler, Antonio Negri: A Rebellion That Never Happened Ends (2004). But only after listening to the two-hour lecture do you understand what Giovannitti wants to say.

Throughout her slide show, Giovannitti commands the attention of viewers in her deliberately limited audience of 12 as she methodically describes how her faith—in humanity and in God—disintegrated after her stint at the tech company. After quitting that job, deciding the nine-to-five wasn’t 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 with sex work. In her lecture she tells us that after Working girl came out she started wearing baggy clothes instead of revealing ones, because she felt it unnecessary to show her body in the everyday context, when she had already exposed herself as someone who sells her body. To prove her point, Giovannitti hangs a pair of baggy shorts and a T-shirt from the gallery wall and, without much fuss, changes into the outfit for her audience.

As the reading progresses, we learn where Giovannitti found her faith again: in Toby Keith, whose music video plays in the periphery as the artist speaks. Keith, a country star, was characterized during his lifetime as a George W. Bush conservative. Throughout her performance, Giovannetti insists that she has a “genuine relationship” with Keith’s music, and with other features of rural America, and that, to borrow the musician’s lyrics, she “should have been a cowboy.” This show, we come to realize, is personal, but it attempts to situate itself within a political context—one interested in reframing traditional elements of American right-wing culture, like country music, as radically progressive. While it certainly took tenacity and a strong sense of self-worth for Giovannitti to continue in a profession that once saw her deal with financial exploitation and insecurity, one wonders if her newfound identification with the “cowboy” and country music stems from a fantasy of gender role reversal. Given the difficulties of being a woman in today’s world, the artist seems more comfortable with escapism than with fighting back against those who would disrespect her.

While Giovannitti acknowledges the perhaps impossible nature of the attempt, he uses Does it have a genuine relationship with God? to preempt the critics whose both flattering and reductive reviews of her memoir she addresses in her talk. Giovannitti’s show is ultimately an exploration of what happens when an artist deliberately generates analysis and discourse around their work. Like a memoirist, an artist can curate and shape the narrative of their lived experience, but as this show suggests, the process invariably offers only one version of a story, which viewers can judge as they wish.

You know I have it, so come and get it. at Blade Study, New York, June 6 – July 7