The exhibition title, Night Carries Color, emerges from an interest in what remains present even as it changes, recedes, or becomes obscured. Within the paintings, color is often pushed backward, or surrounded by darker and quieter fields. Night is not understood as an absence or erasure, but as something capable of holding and carrying what came before.

Stoffer is interested in the fact that alteration never returns a surface to an untouched state; each change leaves behind some evidence of its previous condition.

Working with linen, oil paint, hand-dyed yarn, thread, collage, paper-clay pins painted with gouache, and pastel, Stoffer establishes a set of material and aesthetic parameters within which instinct, revision, and physical action can occur. Expansive fields of color, organic forms, and broad gestures are interrupted by yarn sewn directly through the surface, at times veiling painted shapes and creating weight, direction, and texture.

The physicality of making is central to her practice. As she pushes and pulls yarn through the linen, the surface is worked from both sides, creating tension through a repetitive movement back and forth around the canvas. The linen and yarn are almost played like an instrument.

Other elements are similarly handled through an active process of testing, moving, and revising. Stoffer dyes her own yarn, sculpts small tactile paper-clay pins, and cuts pieces of linen that are temporarily pinned, repositioned, and tested on the surface before being incorporated with paint. The pins puncture the paintings at specific points, directing the eye across the composition and functioning almost as punctuation within the larger field.

Stoffer’s process is at once intuitive and methodical, and the paintings are repeatedly revised as they develop. Colors become obscured, forms are reduced, and entire areas may be pushed beneath subsequent layers, allowing pentimenti and previous states to remain visible. Yarn is often removed as the composition evolves, leaving behind holes and traces of an earlier decision or direction rather than something to be concealed. The surface becomes an accumulation of actions: additions, removals, interruptions, and changes of course.

Something of what came before always remains, becoming part of the painting’s history. This process reflects a broader understanding of lived experience, in which decisions accumulate, directions change, and things are added or removed, yet earlier experiences continue to inform what something becomes. 

In Night Carries Color, what recedes is not lost. It remains embedded in the surface, carried forward in altered form.