A workshop performance lead by Alba Soto [Spain]
SCREWING THE PIECES
SAT 08 APR | 7PM | $5 suggested
Artists in a week long workshop present their work in an evening of performance art designed by the participants: KEEGAN CONDON | STEPH MEZA | VERòNICA RODRIGUEZ | AMANDA STAPLES | JAKE EVEKER | ALBA SOTO
Alba Soto is an artist working and living in Madrid, Spain. Dr. Soto holds a Phd in Fine Arts and is a specialist in interdisciplinary and performing tools for creation and teaching. She served as the chairperson and as a professor of Fine Arts at Universidad Nebrija from 2009 to 2015 and has conducted workshops and seminars at universities around the world, including the Kymenlaakson University of Applied Sciences in Finland; the UCA University for the Creative Art in the UK; Hochschule für Künste Bremen in Germany; and Universidad de los Andes in Colombia. Alba is an actively working artist and her practice is underpinned by intuition, spontaneity and surprise as a survival strategy. Her performances, video art and drawings have been showcased at a number of national and international festivals and exhibitions.
photos by
Kala Madriz. Ala y Mesura, Galería Modus Operandi 2017, Madrid
Sarah Gottlieb. Ala y Mesura. Tercer Espacio 2017
Video Frame of Pia Cruzalegui. Apples. Zhou B Art Center 2016
ALBA SOTO ARTIST STATEMENT
For me it’s about the essentials: breathe, the alternation of disciplines; I shift between drawing and performance, feeding off video and painting as well. Expressing myself through any one single medium drains me; one way of communicating makes me feel exhausted. Therefore, my specialty relies on a variety of processes and the flexibility of techniques. This alleged dispersion concretizes a particular universe, one in which all things relate to each other. It weaves a coherent narrative underpinned by intuition, spontaneity and surprise as strategies for survival.
My performative universe begins with my surrounding reality.
Through direct contact with the space and the audience, the most intimate experiences are healed through the act of performance. These experiences, questions, and desires, are first symbolically constructed, then ritualized with inevitable tints of irony.
Meanwhile, the universe of my visual art is formed through an opposite process. I generate images that come from subconscious impulses; a kind of psychic rattling, spiritual and dreamy, that I must complete and step back from in order to analyze and understand.
I use my work to produce change in patterns. I work in pursuit of freedom, wishing to find myself as I am, discover new possibilities, and distance myself from artifice. I reclaim my own prerogative to express myself. I reclaim what I am with the greatest possible frankness. As I work, I hear the voice of Emily Dickinson whispering, “I live in possibility”…
