Upstairs Gallery: Sofía del Mar Collins: To turn into rain and fall again

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Sofía del Mar Collins
To turn into rain and fall again

July 11 - August 16, 2024
Opening Reception: Thursday, July 11, 6 - 8pm

To turn into rain and fall again features Sofía del Mar Collins’ most recent ongoing series of watercolor based paintings on hand dyed silk. The artist’s multilayered practice blends materials and techniques, creating a work that, deeply reverent to the natural world and the knowledge that comes from its rhythms, canalizes the vibrant energy from that which is transforming.

Collins’ process begins with the extraction of botanical pigments from flowers and compost scraps to dye into silk surfaces. Considering this period of color interactions an iteration of painting itself, the slow hand dying process is one of gradual transitions from one state to the next; a material dynamic that manifests itself as a recurrent theme in works such as A swamp tear of clouds, Mud of fate, and A pond of her own.

Acknowledging the wetland ecosystems found throughout Puerto Rico as integral liminal spaces between earth and water, life and death, Collins’ works celebrate these environments where decomposing matter turns into rich soil. This interplay between matter which is in the process of transmuting into a different state, which then becomes the ground for new growth is at the core of the artist’s depiction of her “pulsating flora.” Always in a state of forming, deforming, and reforming, her process and protagonists echo the wisdoms of botanical life.

The piecework that forms the base of Collins’ paintings are sewn patches of silk that form structural, quilt-like, chromatic triangular structures that extend outwards radially. As a set of fractals, she splits the geometric shapes into a reduced-scale part of the whole. This interest in structure and alternative configurations of space extends into her slow colored pencil drawings series All rooms are where foliage rests in bedrooms significant to the artist. This gentle rupture of the delineation between outside/inside and public/private imagines a middle place while interrogating architectural plans as a geometric construct in and of themselves. Her soft sculpture piece, Seaskirt, similarly channels the tension of vertical and convex lines. Kaleidoscopic, the geometric forms that build the ground of Collins’ works are intrinsically interrelated to the organic forms.

In the process of painting plein-air, it will often rain. Colors melt, layer, and fuse resulting in interlaced nebulous forms. She notes that when this occurs she surrenders to the elements; collaborating with the autonomous flow of what is becoming. Drawing the exhibition title from Alice Oswald’s poem “A short story on falling,” Collins points to rain as one of the maximum expressions of the regenerative cycles that sustain life. With all water on Earth having always existed by continually renewing itself, rain is what it has always been and with each cycle a completely new iteration. To move with the knowledge that all matter is always in process, always flowing, always inherently intertwined with both terrestrial and cosmic bodies, is to recognize that, like rain, we too carry the vital dynamism necessary to inhabit new forms.

- Text by Alexandra Méndez

Sofía del Mar Collins (b.1995, San Juan, PR) creates projects across painting, drawing, soft sculpture, installation, video, and performance. Nadie in casa was her first solo show (Souvenir 154, San Juan, PR, 2023) after completing her MFA in Studio Art at Hunter College (2021). Recent exhibitions include participations in MECAnismos (Souvenir 154, Santo Domingo, D.R, 2024), Cortar, Coser, Quebrar, Cuidar, Quemar (Souvenir 154 satellite exhibition in Casa Aboy, San Juan, Puerto Rico, 2024), Tamo Aquí/We here (Embajada, San Juan, Puerto Rico, 2022), En busca del paisaje perdido (El Nuevo Hidrante, San Juan, Puerto Rico, 2022), Extra Terrestrial (Rachel Uffner Gallery, New York, NY, 2022), Paadmaan Video Event Edition #2, curated by Foad Alijani and Greg Leshé (Sharif Gallery, Tehran, Iran, 2021), Reclamar el Suelo, Declamar la Tierra, curated by Arte-Suelo-Ser, (Hidrante, San Juan, PR, 2021), Common Ground, (Children Museum of the Arts, New York, NY, 2019-2020), and Endless Editions Biennial: Optimism, curated by Lukaza Branfman-Verissimo (EFA Project Space, New York, NY, 2018). Sofia graduated with the Geraldine Putnam Prize for Visual Arts (2017) from Sarah Lawrence College, where she concentrated BA studies in Sociology and Visual Arts. Sofía currently lives and works in San Juan, PR.