About the Work
In Abridged (Anne of Green Gables), Valeska Soares arranged, side by side, forty pages of the Canadian novel Anne of Green Gables, forming a grid that starts and ends with a missing page. Soares covered the text in each page with black ink geometric forms (square forms made from small dots, ink-filled circles, thin vertical straight lines, horizontal thick lines). In an act that is partly revealing and partly concealing, the fusion of text and drawings work as “triggers that activate memories and contexts.” The result is an open narrative with multiple readings that are brought to life by the viewer and by the context in which the piece is experienced.
About the Artist
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.
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