Intimacies of Conflict is a new exhibit of paintings by Becky Soria at Gallery 3 in Houston starting October 6 and lasting through October 30, 2009 . The Opening is on October 10th from 5 to 9 PM. The author Carol Williamette will be reading from texts documenting her experiences traveling in Africa at 3:30 and 7:00 PM. Becky Soria has been a Premiere Portfolio Member at absolutearts.com since 2002.
IMAGE
Becky Soria
Title: Journey
Year Created: 2008
Medium: Acrylic Painting
Width: 36 inches
Height: 48 inches
Price: US$ 1,200
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View and purchase Becky Sorias work, visit her Portfolio at absolutearts.com http://www.absolutearts.com/beckyart
Metamorphic rock is the result of the transformation of an existing rock type, the protolith, in a process called metamorphism, which means change in form. The protolith is subjected to heat and pressure (temperatures greater than 150 to 200 °C and pressures of 1500 bars[1]) causing profound physical and/or chemical change. (Wikipedia)
Becky Sorias newest works are not easy works. They continue and extend her work with metamorphic human forms. The human protolith is subjected to the pressure of life, be it the Afghan war in the painting Soldier, or, in the painting Falling, the innocent stumble that leads to a death tumbling down stairs. It is not physical heat and pressure, of course that the human protolith is subjected to in her works, but psychic pressure and subtle energetic heat. The subtle heat is known in the East as prana, chi, or lung, whose course through the body is like the steady course of a stream that carves up a mountain. The psychic pressure is that we all know and call stress and physical and psychic pain.
Melting (sometimes called fusion) is a physical process that results in the phase change of a substance from a solid to a liquid. The internal energy of a solid substance is increased, typically by the application of heat or pressure, resulting in a rise of its temperature to the melting point, at which the rigid ordering of molecular entities in the solid breaks down to a less-ordered state and the solid liquefies. An object that has melted completely is molten. (Wikipedia)
Beckys paintings melt the mind/body distinction for her bodies seem both material, and yet not material, yet surely not spiritual in the sense of bodies of light. This is not yet a being evolving to a higher place of pure light but rather being made molten by that very same light experienced as the heat and pressure of transformation. But Becky does not leave us an easy hope, for we do not know if this is a process of refining to the purest metal, or the bending, nay breaking of the human being.
In two of her latest works, Male and Female, it is as if she wanted to take an MRI scan of the protolith as it metamorphizes. The works call to mind the brain scans that some scientists are so ready to call pictures of the human mind. In these works, she leaves the surface of the painting very flat, like a film or screenshot of the scan. The male figure stands, giving the impression of having his hands in his pockets, unaware that a topographic image of the state of his body/mind/consciousness/subtle energy body has been taken. The strange topography of the other person in the second painting called Female conveys that it is a female protolith.
Slowly, slowly, Becky develops her own visual language, a language called into being by her own experience of being a protolith. She is at the same crossroads that the west is, aware that there is so much more than the normal range of experience of a western human being and so much more than the limited ontology of the truth-limiting western sciences. But how to express all of it in a way true to the experience... that is the challenge she continues to take up in Intimacies of Conflict.
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