Valeska Soares: Any Moment Now
March 24 – July 15, 2018
Phoenix Museum of Art, AZ.
Valeska Soares: Any Moment Now brings together approximately 45 artworks, consisting of installation, sculpture, photography, and video, dating from the early 1990s to the present.
Soares creates polished, minimalistic artworks that encourage visitor participation. Through installation and assemblage, she engages with international art traditions and world literature. In her multifaceted art, she demonstrates a fascination with space and time, as well as what occurs beyond their perceived limits. Her works directly engage visitors’ subjectivities, cultivating both personal experience and universal knowledge and how each of these affects the other. Soares’s environmental installations incorporate the effects of reflection, light, entropy, and even scent. Such experiential qualities are rendered through the incorporation of suspended mirrors, light fixtures, perishing flowers, and vessels of perfume and liquor that slowly evaporate over the course of the exhibition. She also often creates installations of book pages, covers, and bindings to weave meanings between disparate texts that viewers connect conceptually by association. Past and future simultaneously permeate her installations and objects, suggesting an underlying narrative that is often cyclical. Weaving together the themes of memory, time, and the sensorial, Soares creates poetic works that fuse and expand upon the languages of post-minimalism and conceptual art. As fellow Brazilian artist Vik Muniz has stated: “Through a seemingly inexhaustible range of techniques, themes, and strategies, Soares’ work oscillates between materiality and memory, desire and decay, sensation and intoxication.”