Becky Soria “Consequential Journeys” New Paintings at Archway Gallery
Becky Soria “Consequential Journeys” New Paintings at Archway Gallery
Becky Soria “Consequential Journeys” New Paintings at Archway Gallery
On April 3 Patrick Palmer, Dean and Studio School Faculty Chair and Department Head of Art History, Glassell School of Art at MFAH, notified colleagues, students and friends that he had just seen Becky Soria’s art exhibition “Consequential Journeys” at Archway Gallery. Soria, Palmer wrote, is “truly a unique and talented painter whose artistic focus tends to concentrate on women and their force in our world. I particularly love how she weaves nature into her stories.”
Last week Soria said a few things about the art she is showing at Archway Gallery through April 29, 2021. She typically uses strong colors, unexpected textures and irregular forms to make distorted, abstracted representations of the human figure. This particular body of work evolved as we got walloped by unforeseen events such as acts of nature, political turmoil and the pandemic. Her images express anxiety as well as healing and human transformation.
Some images are overwhelmingly feminine, with absurdly bulbous breasts and hips and skewed reproductive areas. These symbolize fecundity and regeneration, and are intended “to honor” women. Soria said that during this difficult time women demonstrated strength and courage as health caregivers who helped fellow human beings, as well as in the political arena.
It is 2012 or 2013, and I’m sitting on a stool in Becky Soria’s studio. I carried in my can of diet coke, because Soria believes the artificial sweetener in diet coke is garbage and harmful to the body, and she knows a lot about the body. On visits like these I learned a few things about Soria’s art. One of the reasons her art has an overwhelming organic quality, with depictions of entrails and other messy tissues, is her father was a physician in Cochabamba, Bolivia. “I inherited his love for biology, which is evident in my paintings.” Soria herself had a nursing career.
One of the most enlightening explanations of Soria’s art came from Bruce Leutwyler. He linked Soria’s art to her practice of meditation and “mindfulness” in the face of chronic pain. Leutwyler wrote, in part, “Mindfulness, a form of meditation, is the practice of maintaining a moment-to-moment awareness of our thoughts, feelings, bodily sensations, as well as of the surrounding environment. Becky has spent many years mindful of her thoughts, feelings, and bodily sensations, as well as the world she dwells within. Partly she was forced to attend to her interior landscape because of chronic pain caused by scoliosis. But she turned adversity into opportunity, as her awareness drew itself inward to find an inner landscape of complex structures interrelating thought with sensation, sensation with feeling, feeling engaging idea. But these are relatively abstract conceptualizations of an inner landscape actually characterized by density, texture, color, movement, subtle energies, blockages, releases, compassion bodies, pain bodies, sacred bodies, chakras…”
Archway Gallery
2305 Dunlavy Houston Texas 77006
www.archwaygallery.com