Valeska Soares

In sculptures, installations, films, and paintings, Valeska Soares recontextualizes familiar objects and perspectives to enable transformative encounters. Soares repurposes objects with histories of domestic use like antique furniture, carpets, glasses, old books, and portrait paintings. Soares alters these objects through subtle interventions: cutting, reversing, or removing geometric sections; painting surfaces with monochromatic, abstract patterns; installing mirrors over forms; or creating large-scale, two or three-dimensional fields of similar objects. Through these changes, these banal items become suddenly unfamiliar, abstract, and therefore, new again. Coupled with other sensory triggers, like the overpowering scents of perfume, flowers, and stale alcohol, Soares’ installations appeal to viewers’ subjective impressions to provoke the formation of new relationships to personal emotional histories and memories.