Tracey Emin & Ty Dolla $ign Explore the Meaning of Softness

Get intimate with 'Feelings: Soft Art,' a furry new book from Rizzoli.

by Emerson Rosenthal

November 22, 2015, 7:00pm

Parker Ito © Feelings: Soft Art, Skira Rizzoli, 2015. All images courtesy Skira Rizzoli

Amid the calcifying effect of existence-over-time, the most hardened heart'd be pressed to deny Andrei Tarkovsky's advice: "Hardness and strength are death's companions. Pliancy and weakness are expressions of the freshness of being. Because what has hardened will never win." It is within the furry book, Feelings: Soft Art, a new thematic publication from Rizzoli, that we may find a shoulder to lean on.

Feelings is a book about sensation, first and foremost. Its felt-bound pages contain soft colors, squishy materials, and foggy things. "A viewer takes in a piece through his or her senses, and first responds to the work from those perceptions," Rizzoli writes. Artists include Tracey Emin, Ty Dolla $ign, soft focus spectre Petra Collins, 'Serial Chiller' Parker Ito, hair-raising writings from Karley Sciortino, a collaboration between Dev Hynes and soft portrait scribe Alice Lancaster, and the first-ever meeting between between contemporary fuzz painter Sterling Ruby and Storm King "soft" sculptor Lynda Benglis.

"Soft Art suggests that these gut reactions are not only worth consideration, but may be the best gateway into deeper deliberations about a work," Rizzoli continues. Sometimes, true power is in the ability to be gentle, and in the case of Rizzoli's new book, no more makes itself true than a feeling.

The Creators Project has obtained exclusive images from Feelings: Soft Art, including a work (above) by Ito that otherwise exists solely within the book's pages.