Faculty of Art
Drawing and Painting
Meet the Artist
Sophia
Chavez
Drawing and Painting
“A longing to relate to something tangible, to reduce and simmer onself until it is nothing but a symbol, to reduce life experience to totems that represent that specific time in my life. I am collector of toys and hoarder of unassuming items with sentimentality. In framing my Asian femme body as a commodifiable object, I critique processes of fetishization, identity and hyper-feminity and girlhood. I yearn to find representation where it lacks,Drawn to using intuition as an approach to my materiality; my use of oil paint, graphite, and spray paint become signifiers of my emotive visual language. I navigate the tension between the fleshing and defacing subject matter as the paintings slowly start to take form and mirror personal narratives.Inspired by the femmages, I weaponize girlishness and kitschiness as a way to subvert capitalist and patriarchal constraints. With an attempt to take up space I force you to confront my identity through your preconceptions. All of my works are a form of self-portraiture reflecting on shame, anger and acceptance of my selfhood.”