"I use languages of printmaking, drawing, photography and poetic text to explore questions of cultural belonging, hybridity and memory. I work on and with the paper, the substrate civilizations are recorded upon, the last bastion of tactility in our world of virtual images. The processes themselves and metaphors they offer, the physicality of paper and drawing media, the visual sources I use, all inform my work.
There is no discernible center of my images, and the floating elements come in and out of focus, alternatively anchoring and orbiting others, settling nowhere permanently. I use perspective, but not as illusionistic tool. I cultivate the space in drawing or print that is polyphonic and at times contradictory. The works are metaphorical maps of change, perishing and memory. They beg for highly individualized, poetic translation. I hope that the viewer sees them the way one sees a familiar thicket of weeds one day, in particular moment, in particular light, suddenly awash in form and meaning."
—Tanja Softić
Born in Bosnia in 1966, Tanja Softić studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Sarajevo and earned her M.F.A. in Printmaking from Old Dominion University in Norfolk, Virginia in 1992. She works across the media of printmaking, drawing, photography and book arts, and teaches at the University of Richmond. She is a recipient of the Pollock-Krasner Grant, National Endowment for the Arts/ Southern Arts Federation Visual Artist Fellowship and Soros Foundation—Open Society Institute Grant. Her work is included in collections worldwide, among them those of the New York Public Library, Library of Congress Print Department and New South Wales Gallery of Art in Sydney, Australia.
Migrant Universe: Angel of Absence is an enigmatic and powerful work that seems to assume its own sense of gravity. Inspired by medical and botanical illustrations, maps and charts, and manuscript illuminations, Softić deftly weaves together figures both clinical and commonplace; teacups and strands of beads are juxtaposed with cellular and plant-like forms. The composite nature of her work addresses concepts of cultural hybridity and transience. Critic James Foritano of Artscope magazine notes that within her work, “untroubled by the boundaries of our daily three-dimensionality, commentaries swim both in front of and in back of this cosmic disruption, unconcerned and undisputed.” In its mysterious otherworldliness, Angel of Absence speaks to what the writer Edward Said called “an awareness of simultaneous dimensions,” a concept upon which Softić concentrates throughout all of her Migrant Universe works.
Created between 2007-2011, the Migrant Universe series is comprised of ten works that, taken together, constitute a ‘visual poem.’ Softić mounts fine Japanese paper onto a repeatedly gessoed and sanded birch plywood surface, then simultaneously sizes and stains the paper with thin washes of pigment and acrylic medium. She composes her imagery in acrylic, charcoal, chalk, and graphite, eschewing automatized techniques in favor of a highly manual and deliberate process.
Studio of the Artist
2014 Migrant Universe, University Museums, University of Richmond, VA; Migrant Universe, University Galleries, Tufts University, Medford, MA
2013 Migrant Universe, Eleanor D. Wilson Museum, Hollins University, Roanoke, VA
2011 Migrant Universe, Halsey Institute for Contemporary Art, College of Charleston, SC