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Sofia F, Exhibition HL

Freedom and Restriction

Sofia began to identify a personal sense of direction and focus for her work, in the summer before her final year of IB at La Vigna Art Studios IB Art summer course. Her teacher Nicola guided her successfully through the final year, which was mostly spent in quarantine at home due to the Covid-19 outbreak in Milan, with limited supplies and only remote teaching support, from February through until the visual arts uploading of exams in April 2020.

Starting with the topics of travel, movement, cycles and sequences, her work found a focus in the concept of freedom of movement and it's opposite, restriction, and this in turn became a vehicle for addressing social issues today as well as her own feelings of restriction during quarantine.

She worked across a range of media, mostly paper and print based, finding innovative and elegant solutions suited to the expressive goals of her work. See Sofia F, HL Process Portfolio  for insight into her working process.

She received 29/30, almost full marks, brava Sofia!

These images form part of a series done during quarantine, transfer prints overlaid with with ink pen, sourced from photos in the New York Times showing the world's empty cities, empty streets, the eerie absence of movement. Note in the exhibition text how she includes a source reference.

Exhibition text for image 9 (detail above)

Living Room Postcards,  03/2020

Fineliner, Transfer Prints on Embossed Somerset paper.

91.5x61.5 cm

Like old postcards, our phone screens enable travel far beyond our 4 walls, even now we are stuck inside. Here past merges with present transforming screenshots of “The Great Empty”[1], a New York Times article into ‘postcards’ portraying the world’s empty cities, directly opposing the movement occurring in countries photographed before lockdown and represented with the wave embossings. Crosshatching directs the viewer’s attention, reinforcing the image central to each transfer print.

[1] Kimmelman, M., 2020. The Great Empty. The New York Times,.

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Curatorial Rationale

 

“(1) Everyone has the right to freedom of movement and residence within the borders of each state. (2) Everyone has the right to leave any country, including his own, and to return to this country”Article 13, Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948)[1]. 

Freedom of movement is heavily disregarded by politicians who chose to close borders and build physical and ideological walls. My desire to address the “migration crisis” so heavily influencing politics arose during a volunteering experience in Calabria. There, I heard the story of twenty year old Abdoulaye who came to Italy following the migration route through Libya and the Mediterranean. While the media merges human lives into large numbers so abstracted from human lives that we forget that this is what is being discussed, my experience shed light on the horror of individual journeys. Such a politically impregnated theme was heavily influenced by William Kentridge and Ciprian Muresan, both presently engaged in the historical developments of their countries.

Subject matter came largely from my photographs taken in Uruguay, South Africa, Morocco and Libya during the IB course. Copying and layering these images, much like Muresan’s All Images from a book on Andrei Cadere, attempts to condemn the tendency to accept everything the media shares, without the understanding or knowledge to grasp the true meaning of what organs of communication feed us.

The human figures central to my work are often seen in movement suggesting migration but also  more universal ideas of man constantly in movement physically and metaphysically. Initial ideas were moulded by a National Geographic article, “We are all migrants'' containing a graph, “Migration Waves”[2] which became central in my work. The collage Waves, a manifesto of freedom of movement and truth hidden from us, employs discarded prints from my drypoint Hope. These waves reoccur in other works: embossed in Living Room Postcards, as ‘windows’ into past and future in Now What?.

Kentridge’s Atlas Procession, brought me to explore printing with drypoint and transfer in Walk III and Living Room Postcards, also containing elements coherent to the philosophical influence of Boutroux, and embossing, an effect requiring active visual participation of the viewer, an element I understood as key in creating meaningful artwork following study of Kline’s Le Gros.

My first embossing, Walk II, is a subtle declaration of freedom against politically imposed barriers represented visually with barbed wire. This element undergoes a transformation, with graphite in Walk II, ink in Walk III and finally, real wire escaping the barriers of the paper in Stop.

Like Kline, I too borrowed medium from other cultures using handmade Japanese papers in Walk I and Walk III to reflect ongoing global culture appropriation which makes rejection of certain foreign populations by governments absurd and nonsensical. Playing with scale creates interesting visual juxtapositions, ensuring viewers are constantly involved and moving with the work, closer to explore details, farther away to obtain a holistic view. Muresan’s use of graphite creating images without clear borders prompted me to use this medium in Hope and Walk I, but also deckled edges suggest unclear beginnings and endings.

Lockdown prohibited exhibiting work where and how planned, in a long, angled room and corridor forcing viewers to travel across different spaces to view the artwork.  It made realization of certain artworks impossible, such as the A2 embossing intended for Walk II and I substituted or reworked other pieces, like #StayHome. However subsequent work developed as I was led to interpret freedom of movement in new directions. Suddenly I had no freedom. Pivotal in this new direction, Before and After, inspired by Muersan’s palimpsests, were created during transition from ‘normal’ life to housebound existence. The change can be observed through juxtaposition of the triptychs Hope and Stop, format chosen for its ability, according to Kentridge, to convey movement. Whilst Hope shows a journey towards freedom of movement, Stop features its revocation, suggested by the gradual decrease in figures occupying each canvas. An intended timelapse at Stazione Centrale became #StayHome timelapse from my window and the idea of postcards grew into the piece closest to me right now, Living Room Postcards, a journey around “The Great Empty”[3] cities of the world from my phone screen.

[1] https://www.un.org/en/universal-declaration-human-rights/  [Accessed 17 April 2020]

[2] Lucas Lopez, A., Williams, R. and Berne, K., 2019. Migration Waves. National Geographic,.

[3] Kimmelman, M., 2020. The Great Empty. The New York Times,.

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