“With a discerning eye and a brush, I
have spent much of my life
as an artist and a painter
exploring the intersection of myth, mind and society.”
Becky Soria
as an artist and a painter
exploring the intersection of myth, mind and society.”
Becky Soria
The South
American born artist Becky Soria has
had a lifelong interest in mankind’s earliest artistic endeavors; the 20
thousand year old iconography paintings of the Paleolithic
and Neolithic eras of human pre-history. Using these works as inspiration Soria
recreates her own versions to explore the motivations that drive the human
animal.
As she explained to the Houston based art historian and
writer Virginia Billeaud Anderson on The
Great God Pan is Dead blog “It’s a quality in pre-Colombian art or African art, related to
simplicity, distortion, a sort of reductive abstraction that reaches to the
essence of something. You know it by its estranging imperfection. The primitive
was all around me when I was a child in Bolivia, the archaeological site of
Tiahuanaco, for instance, and my father had an important collection of
pre-Colombian artifacts…
The thing that is so intriguing is that we don’t know their arts’
purpose, anthropologist can only speculate about its meaning…
[And] Along with the enigma
of their meaning, I’m fascinated by their present look, that is, the plasticity
they have today, altered and damaged by time. Some of the drawings and
paintings incorporate uneven cave wall surfaces into their design. I take from
all of that, and make “my own” contemporary expression. Most importantly I am
trying to capture their mood.”
About Soria’s 2014 exhibition Totems Beyond Patriarchy at Houston’s Gallery
M Squared the gallery’s Max Harrison wrote “She has captured omething deep
seated within each of us, something that has allowed mankind to flourish and
thrive. Examing Miss Soria’s latest body of work viewers will an opportunity to
explore what it means to be sentient of self or what it is, ‘to be.’ I can’t
help but think of the caves at Lascaux, France and how early man used imagery
over 15,000 years ago to communicate their inner thoughts to others. Pictorial
communication expresses concepts and ideas to viewers even when we don’t speak
the language of the creator or story teller. What stories do we tell ourselves
within the cave of self, and what story do we tell our children around the home
fires?”
Soria’s
current exhibition Essence: A new body of paintings
is on show at Houston’s Archway
Gallery until the 5th of November.
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