TCVA.org

December 5, 2014 - March 21, 2015 Gallery A

Hours Tuesday - Thursday & Saturday: 10am-6pm

Friday: 12pm-8pm

Tanja Softic

Gathered from Available Data

,

On the day Art Tanja Softic defended her master of fine arts thesis at Old Dominion University in 1992, war broke out in her hometown of Sarajevo. “My plan was to go back [to Sarajevo] after I graduated,” she recalls. With her country embroiled in the Bosnian Civil War, however, her plans suddenly changed. By the time Softic arrived to teach at the University of Richmond in 2000, she had become a U.S. citizen. As she explains in her artist’s statement, “I have transitioned through three citizenships in addition to one period of being a citizen of no country.” This experience has deeply influenced her work. As someone who lived the first 23 years of her life as a citizen of a different country, Softic invites her audience to ponder notions of belonging, and what it means to be a foreigner in a foreign land.

“I feel very American when I am back in Sarajevo, and feel Sarajevan when I come back,” she says. “Not being really sure about your identity is not really tragic — like something was lost. It is a reality that I share with many, many people in the world.”

Excerpt from the University of Richmond Art Department Faculty Website

Gathered from Available Data, 2014

Artist’s Statement My work explores concepts of cultural hybridity, of locating oneself in ever expanding notions of universe and society, and the nature of memory. As an immigrant to United States from Bosnia, once part of Yugoslavia, I am acutely aware of the inadequacy of established definitions of cultural or national identity. How our histories are recorded and how they shape our notions of identity, what is our place and our task in the web of life of the planet, what is cultural memory and to whom does it belong—the questions loom large, and there are no reassuring answers, the environmental and cultural phenomena we are witnessing do not fit in the file cabinets of history. My work aims to capture this state of flux, acknowledge the obsolescence of categories, and work with the tattered web of memory.

TCVA.org

Tanja Softic´ studied at the Academy of Fine Arts of the University of Sarajevo and Old Dominion. An immigrant to United States from the former Yugoslavia, she explores questions of cultural identity, national belonging and experience of exile, working across the media of printmaking, drawing, photography and book arts. She is Professor of Art at the University of Richmond.

Softic has received numerous grants including a Pollock-Krasner Grant, the National Endowment for the Arts/ Southern Arts Federation Visual Artist Fellowship and the Soros Foundation—Open Society Institute Exhibition Support Grant. Her work is included in numerous collections worldwide, among them the New York Public Library, Library of Congress Print Department and New South Wales Gallery of Art in Sydney, Australia. She won a First Prize at the 5th Kochi International Triennial Exhibition of Prints, Ino-cho Paper Museum in Kochi, Japan in 2002. She completed print projects at Flying Horse Press, Tamarind Institute and Anderson Ranch’s Patton Print Studio.

Related Exhibition EventsFebruary

6:00pm

Turchin Center Lecture SeriesJoin us at the Turchin Center for a gallery talkled by artists Tanja Softic

4th

About the Artist

The vocabulary of my pieces includes elements of landscape, microscopic life forms, architectural details and renderings, obsolete geographical maps, astronomical charts, and anatomical fragments as visual signifiers of a displaced existence. The images usually begin with the memory of particular place of personal significance, and I allow both form and content to take lead as I combine the image with other visual elements. As I develop a print, I am conscious of the atomization and flattening of the image that happens in the process of matrix development (color separation, tracing, halftone, to give a few examples) and aggregation, layering, closing that happens at the printing end. The exchange between the two ways of working with the image is the formal anchor in both my prints and drawings.

In my work, there is no discernible center of the image and the floating elements come in and out of focus, alternatively anchoring and orbiting others, settling nowhere permanently. I use perspective, but not as illusionistic tool. I cultivate the space in drawing or print that is polyphonic and at times contradictory. The works are metaphorical maps of change, perishing and memory. They beg for highly individualized, poetic translation. I hope that the viewer sees them the way one sees a familiar thicket of weeds one day, in particular moment, in particular light, suddenly awash in form and meaning. A

rtist’s

Sta

tem

ent

Co

ntin

ued.

...

TCVA.org

December 5, 2014 - March 21, 2015 Gallery A

Hours Tuesday - Thursday & Saturday: 10am-6pm

Friday: 12pm-8pm

Tanja Softic

Gathered from Available Data

,

Borderlands: See, 2014 Lithograph$2,400

Borderlands: Hear, 2014 Lithograph$2,400

Borderlands: Feel, 2014 Lithograph$2,400

Time and Space, 2010 Acrylic, pencil, ink, charcoal, pigment of paper mounted on panel $18,000

Nocturne for My Father, 2010Acrylic, pencil, ink, charcoal, pigment of paper mounted on panel $18,000

Gathered from Available Data, 2014Acrylic, pencil, ink, charcoal, pigment and collage on paper mounted on panel$4,000

What Could Not Be Contained, 2014Acrylic, pencil, ink, charcoal, pigment and collage on paper mounted on panel$4,000

Future of Secrets, 2014Acrylic, pencil, ink, charcoal, pigment and collage on paper mounted on panel$4,000

What We Did Not Know, 2014Acrylic, pencil, ink, charcoal, pigment and collage on paper mounted on panel$4,000

Laws of Levity, 2014Acrylic, pencil, ink, charcoal, pigment and collage on paper mounted on panel$4,000

Field Map, 2014Acrylic, pencil, ink, charcoal, pigment and collage on paper mounted on panel$750

Prefiguration , 2014Acrylic, pencil, ink, charcoal, pigment and collage on paper mounted on panel$750

Complex Collision, 2014Acrylic, pencil, ink, charcoal, pigment and collage on paper mounted on panel$750

Exhibition Listing

TCVA.org

Premonition, 2014Acrylic, pencil, ink, charcoal, pigment and collage on paper mounted on panel$750

Inquiry, 2014 Acrylic, pencil, ink, charcoal, pigment and collage on paper mounted on panel$750

Ways to Infiltrate, 2014Acrylic, pencil, ink, charcoal, pigment and collage on paper mounted on panel$750

A Very Small Intervention, 2014Acrylic, pencil, ink, charcoal, pigment and collage on paper mounted on panel$750

Forecast, 2014Acrylic, pencil, ink, charcoal, pigment and collage on paper mounted on panel$750

Stage Left, 2014Acrylic, pencil, ink, charcoal, pigment and collage on paper mounted on panel$750

Conversants, 2014Acrylic, pencil, ink, charcoal, pigment and collage on paper mounted on panel$750

Calling of Lazarus, 2014 Acrylic, pencil, ink, charcoal, pigment and collage on paper mounted on panel$750

Tanja Softic

Gathered from Available Data

,

Near Contact, 2014Acrylic, pencil, ink, charcoal, pigment and collage on paper mounted on panel$750

Premonitions, 2014Acrylic, pencil, ink, charcoal, pigment and collage on paper mounted on panel$750

Cast Doubt , 2014Acrylic, pencil, ink, charcoal, pigment and collage on paper mounted on panel$750

Down at the River, 2014Acrylic, pencil, ink, charcoal, pigment and collage on paper mounted on panel$750

Borderlands, 2014