BECKY SORIA

Bellaire, Texas - United States

Personal Photo of Becky Soria, Artist 100 x 86

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November 2002

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Artist Statement:

"Subject matter in painting is merely the trigger that allows the expression of something more profound, unconscious and possibly hidden even from oneself, and therefore all inclusive, so viscerally immanent to humankind" ( R. Alonzo) Totems beyond Patriarchy" May 2014 Nature has been qualified as a female organic form by most ancient cultures, but for the last millennia or so, the world has been primarily perceived and shaped by the masculine side of the species. Our recent history however has seen a trend towards a natural reversion to a feminine bias, with women becoming increasingly more crucial to all aspects of society. These ... Read More works serve to remind us about these issues and others that we continue to face the world while reinventing the female figure as an emblem for current conditions and a new Totem for the future. The juxtaposition between the representations of the animals and plants in compromised an ailing conditions and the female form that seems to swallow and revive the life- infused aspects of her creation, render a sense of hope for a future in which the maternal provides a healing force to an ailing planet. Signs. Symbols. Sentinels" February 2, 2013 The works of the present exhibition are the works done with the intention of exploring the physicality of animals, in particular as it relates to the bodies of a specific group of animals: the bison, the bull, the horse etc. These are animals of our Paleolithic past. Needless to say, my intentions are to connect with our primitive and archetypical ancestry by re- articulating within our contemporary context those prehistoric images, their human bodies and their animals. Thus, these old protagonists acquire new meaning by bringing forth, I hope, the mood and emotional tone of our contemporary world, while at the same time they re- collect ( to whatever extent possible) their ancestral meaning. Most of my images, but not all, are of women � although many male figures, and an abundance of animals, inhabit my pictures as well. But it is woman, as earth and goddess that is the focus of my work. It is her anatomy, her biological capabilities and frailties, her distinctive pains and pleasures, her sexuality and aging, her chthonic status, her tears, her peculiar psychological turns and her existential status that I attempt to capture in my paintings. More specifically, it is the form, or rather, the multiple forms, of the human body that I depict. Naturally, as a woman native of South America, the forms, colors, textures, etc. that I take pains to create on my surfaces belong to a well known Latin American pictorial vocabulary that has roots in ancient Paleolithic forms. Building upon this tradition, I aim to create images that while connected to those �primitive� forms, are nonetheless very contemporary not only in their look, but also because they bring forth the mood and emotional tone of our complex contemporary world. Back to Back" 2012 November 2003 Solo exhibit, new paintings, under the title "BACK TO BACK" presented at Gallery 3, showed some of my introspective analysis of the world at war, and its opposite, an esoteric world at peace. In the show: a series of paintings depicting abstract backs of women, mysterious, with hidden heads and emphasis on their spines. Along with these paintings, I have added excerpts from poems done by my father who was a physician and a poet in South America. I feel these fragments of his poems find their own space between each painting in the collection. I did not intend these poems to be self-referential or have any specific reference to my works. Rather, I see them as an impact from his spirit to mine Becky R Soria METAPHORIC TORSOS Exhibition Statement, January 2007, Solo Exhibition The Jung Center, Houston, Texas From a Jungian perspective 3-12-2006 On the torso aspect of the images. The back of the body is always the promise of a front, but in my work it is a front that never arrives. The mind approaches the world with its preconceptions, - can it see the back without somewhere unconsciously presuming the front --- no --- so what front is presumed? Is there a person represented by a back such as this, is it somebody's back? Is it Woman rejecting being taken as a sexual object? The back is a symbol of rejection, of turning one's back on the viewer, of looking away, but it also represents looking in the same direction as the viewer, looking at the same thing, in the distance. The back for beasts of burden carries the material weight of the world, but for humans, the back carries the weight of the worry, the stress, the pressure, the fear, the grief, and its physiogomy tells the tale (tail) of the person's life. And the back can symbolize the shadow as Jung observed, Taking it in its deepest sense, the shadow is the invisible saurian tail that man still drags behind him. Carefully amputated, it becomes the healing serpent of the mysteries. Only monkeys parade with it. The Integration of the Personality. (1939). On the the abstract aspect of the images Burying into the inchoate place where images manifest, and pure light plays against color and form, I paint my abstract images. But these abstract images many times are on the border of meaning, at the place which allows projection of content from the shadow. As Jung observes, Projections change the world into the replica of one's own unknown face. Aion (1955). CW 14: P.17 And, Filling the conscious mind with ideal conceptions is a characteristic of Western theosophy, but not the confrontation with the shadow and the world of darkness. One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious. "The Philosophical Tree" (1945). In CW 13: Alchemical Studies. P.335 On the collage aspect of some of the images A collage is a beautiful medium to allow the play of ideas as images to play against each other, to conflict, to balance, to unify, and to fracture. It is the post-modern condition to be a dynamic and unstable equilibrium of ideas about the self and the world, where the "real world", if there is such a thing, is lost beneath the cascade of conflicting images purporting to represent it. And did not Jung point us towards this as well, The individual ego could be conceived as the commander of a small army in the struggle with his environments war not infrequently on two fronts, before him the struggle for existence, in the rear the struggle against his own rebellious instinctual nature. Even to those of us who are not pessimists our existence feels more like a struggle than anything else. The state of peace is a desideratum, and when a man has found peace with himself and the world it is indeed a noteworthy event. "Analytical Psychology and Weltanschauung" (1928) In CW 8: The Structure and Dynamics of the Psyche. P.693 November 2008 presented a solo exhibit "ALCHEMY" at Gallery 3. Bruce Leutwyler states: It is the quest to turn base material bas e flesh into spirit. But what is spirit and what is flesh really? In a departure from, yet a movement forward in her investigation of the female form, Becky's new paintings may remind one who contemplates them of the unfinished sculptures in the Accademia Di Belle Arti Florence. The human figures in them are not so much abstracted forms, as forms coming into existence or dissolving out of existence into the primal elements that constitute them. But these elements are not the chemical elements of modern chemistry; rather they are the alchemical elements of a tradition whose wisdom was lost a long ago, and whose truth still awaits a rediscovery. Leutwyler continues, " The basic elements of the holographic simulation we call reality is really only just color... the stuff that dreams are made of. In Becky's paintings it is a dense rich color, pointing to the paradox that that stuff of which we are made, that flesh, that materia originalis, is indeed in fact only paint, the very stuff of color. This experience of density in the color forms is what gives them such sense of reality. Yet that very density, like the illusoriness of te image we read in painting, is not real. Like the figures in her images, dense form is constantly being dissolve and reformed, brought to a rebirth and dying every instant. It is a phantasmagorical miasma that we are desperate at every instant to hold in a reasonable form .So desperate are we, that we do not notice it dissolving returning as it does in Becky's alchemical paintings into the very paint that is all it is..." October 2009. Solo exhibit" INTIMACIES OF CONFLICT" Becky Soria's New Paintings are not easy works. They continue and extend her work with metaphoric works. The human protolith is subjected to the pressure of life, be it Afghan war in the painting Soldier, or, in the paining Falling, the innocent stumbles 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 physic pressure and and subtle energetic heat. The subtle heat in the East is known as prana, chi, or lung, whose course through the body is like the steady course of a stream that carves up a mountain. The physic pressure is that we all know and call " stress" and " physical and physic pain" Becky's 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 the very same light experienced as the heat and pressure transformation. But Becky does not leave us an easy hope, for we do not know if this a process of refining to the purest metal, or bending, nay braking of the human being. In one her latest's works" Male" it is as if she wanted to take and MRI scan of the protolith as it metamorphosis. In these works she leaves the painting very flat, like a film or screen shot 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. Slowly, slowly, Becky develops her own visual 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 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 experience... that is the challenge she continues to take up in " Intimacies of Conflict" January 8th, 2011 BODY- SURFACE - SIGN at Archway Gallery For this exhibition Becky Soria has selected a group of works with diversely abstract female figures as well as a few small paintings from her collection of works with a �primitive approach�. This exhibition entitled �Body, Surfaces, and Symbols� engages the viewer into the experience a variety of female narratives visually articulated not so much by abstracted forms of the female body as by primeval elemental forms � a materia originalis of dense rich color and complex textures that churn human and animal flesh. Yet that very density, like the illusoriness we read in a painting, appears as not so real. Like the figures in her images, dense form is constantly being dissolved and reformed, brought to a rebirth and dying every instant. Slowly, Slowly, Becky explores her own visual language, a language called into being by her own experiences. PRIMITIVE" June 2013 Gallery review by Virginia Anderson posted " The Great God Pan is Dead" BODY TALK" EL LENGUAGE DEL CUERPO" July 13, 2012 by Virginia Anderson posted " The Great Gos Pan is Dead" SIGNS. SIMBOLS. SENTINELS. February 1, 2013 Questions for Becky by Virginia Anderson published by Virginia Anderson at The Great God Pan is Dead" 2013 Included in "The works that I like" by Robert Boyd, art review. 2013 Critique by Lima de Greene curator of contemporary art at The Museum of Fine Arts. 2013 Modern Luxury Houston Magazine
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Artist Exhibitions:

Selected Solo Exhibitions:

2016 Woman and her Symbols" The Jung Center, Houston, TX
2015 ESSENCE, solo exhibit at Archway Gallery, Houston
2014 Paper Works: Co Work Space, Cochabamba, Bolivia
2014 Totems beyond Patriarchy" M Square Gallery, Houston
2013 Signs.Symbols. Sentinels. solo exhibit at Archway
Gallery, Houston TX
2012 Cuerpos" solo exhibit at Nos Caves Vin, Houston,Texas

2011 Primitive", solo exhibit at Redbud Gallery, Houston
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2011 Body,Surface,Signs", Archway Gallery, Houston, Texas
2009 Intimacies of Conflict", Gallery 3, Houston,Texas
2008 Alchemy", Gallery 3, Houston,Texas
2009 Corpo" Palazzo dela Cultura, Verona, Italy.
2007 New Gallery G ...
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Artist Collections:

Museo de Arte Contemporaneo
Patino, Cochabamba, Bolivia
Office of Jose & Karin Prada,
Architect, Cochabamba, Bolivia
Office of Julio Rivas Casas
M.D., Cochabamba, Bolivia
Giancarla ...
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