"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: Night in the Garden is an astoundingly rich collage of figures and references. Layered upon each other, they allow Softić to initiate what she calls a ‘visual conversation,’ between the disparate elements in her drawings. Softić utilizes their differences as metaphors for the various existences she has led in her life, having over time become a citizen of three separate nations, and now having lived and worked for the majority of her life in a nation whose culture is vastly different from that of her native Bosnia. A monumental work composed of two panels fastened together by a system of locks and hinges, Night in the Garden is elegant and surreal; floating strands of pearls and saucers of milk, along with delicate renderings of a satellite and baby bird, amplify the ethereal effect of the composition’s many levels. As if taken directly from memory, its content seems fleeting, and subject to change at any time.
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