Valeska Soares

Valeska Soares uses found and collected objects such as book pages and domestic items to create her sculptures, a process that unfolds into installations and films. In this process, Soares re-casts the objects' individual identity, subverting their original use and creating a specific vocabulary. Recurring themes in Soares's work are interpersonal relationships, glossaries, labyrinths, and gardens, elements through which the artist alludes to mythology, literature, and to art history itself. Interested in matters of subjective borders and ideas of perception, reflection, and distortion, her work explores the complex relationship between how we perceive, experience, and record space and time, and how this plays out in our collective and individual memory. Mirrored surfaces are often used as a strategy to engage the viewer—who becomes a participant—whose senses are also stimulated by sound, scent, and visual illusion. Valeska's work oscillates between materiality and memory, desire and decay, sensation and intoxication.