RICHMOND
by Deborah McLeod
Art Papers 25 no3 42 My/Je 2001

TANJA SOFTIC´'s "Recent Works on Paper" (Marsh Gallery, University of Richmond, October 21 – December 17) offers sustenance on many levels of perception, providing a particularly rare degree of sensual and intellectual satisfaction. Softic´'s two- and three-dimensional drawings and prints, as well as a single sculptural floor installation, take full advantage of the plastic relationship between paper and pigment. Softic´ uses artifacts from the natural world to covertly express her potent cultural themes. Her works on paper are autobiographical as well as biographical, explained in botanical terms and in a richly textured, somber and complex manner that furthers their contemplative, melancholy but transcendent tone. Softic´'s essential message expresses the effects of time, change, loss and how these systems of experience are remembered in human terms as well as in nature. Her highly developed surfaces offer a tarnished mystery and burnished texture as they intimate an intertwining coexistence of historical memory and personal translation.

Though born and raised in Sarajevo, Yugoslavia, Softic´, who occasionally writes for this publication, is presently a resident of the United States and an associate professor of art at the University of Richmond. While she was earning her MFA in the States, war broke out in her homeland, permanently altering its identity and changing the course of her life. In the years since that event, her work has developed to consider her own memories, the remains of altered history but also the industry of regeneration. (Her work was very recently exhibited under the title "Memory Folios" at the Contemporary Art Center of Virginia in Virginia Beach.)

Softic´'s studies of pods, shells, orchid blooms, heart ventricles, spinal columns and rib cages are juxtaposed with architectural fragments and geometric shapes. They are rendered with a hoary, burnished texture that delves deeply into the surface of the paper. The artist prepares her archaeological site layer upon layer as though she herself were geologic time, obscuring past fallen forms in order to accommodate newer ones. Softic´ introduces a vigorous negative space that floats upon the uppermost surface, a commanding yet unarticulated presence. Sometimes this negative space is simply a chill rectangular void. At other times it is a revisitation of the pod in solid black, or it suggests a conch in iron red silhouette. In their final state, all of the drawings are scrims of present and past rendered in charcoal and acrylic pigment, or as prints in etching, drypoint, and mezzotint.

In every composition Softic´ reveals a certain connection to modernism, both in form and artistic tone, although the work is at home in postmodernism. Whether this inclination appears in the dense monolithic rectangle that presides over many of her nature studies or emerges more discreetly in an underlying grid structure, the inclination to order is apparent. It organizes the silent litany of natural profusion, the consummated forms that the artist has relocated from the forest or the floor of the sea to the scientist's examination table and then into her images. Softic´ regenerates these departures by making them sources for the not yet known. The artist's array of barren pods and vacated shells, however, are never absolutely determined as vacated forms. They are much too vigorous, with their animated petals, stems and tentacles or activated patterns that propose continual motion and life-inducing energy. Whether juxtaposed with a glowing duplicate of itself, or animated through sequence, one is made aware that these vestigial objects' roles are not yet over.

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Dream Logic
by David Brickman
Metroland, vol 26., no. 46, November 13, 2003

Tanja Softic: Works on Paper
The College of Saint Rose Art Gallery, through Dec. 7

By now it’s not a surprise: For many years, under the guidance of director Jeanne Flanagan, the little College of Saint Rose Art Gallery has brought artists of world caliber right into the heart of Albany with little fanfare and, sometimes, insufficient public response.

The current solo exhibition of works on paper by Tanja Softic continues this under-the-radar tradition by presenting a solid selection of large-scale pieces in a strong individual style. Softic, of Bosnian Muslim background, was pursuing a graduate degree in the United States when war broke out in her homeland, effectively making her a refugee by the time she finished in 2002. But she seems to have landed on her feet: Now an associate professor at the University of Richmond in Virginia, Softic’s work has been shown widely and placed in public collections from New York and Atlanta to China and New Zealand.

It’s not hard to see why. Working on handmade paper in a mix of media (mainly acrylic and chalk), Softic builds layers of subtle color and texture as a ground for the interplay of carefully rendered, somewhat mystical objects that recur in varying combinations throughout the works shown here. She incorporates elements of abstraction, softly rendered nature and hard-edge realism into a dreamlike stew that is both very comfortable to look at and easily adapted to individual interpretation.

While Softic says in a statement that her drawings “read as text, where one element leads to and reveals another,” I found myself more inclined toward getting the overall gestalt of each piece, absorbing its mood and feeling rather than reading it literally or sequentially. There is a range of atmospheres in these drawings, mostly toward the slightly stormy, but the more recent pieces are decidedly sunnier, exhibiting an inner glow that suffuses the space around them.

Softic has a personal visual vocabulary that includes seedpods, tiny sea creatures, plants and root vegetables; human organs, teeth and bones, as well as those of animals; and man-made objects, real or imagined, many of which appear to have a scientific application, including bowls, flasks, syringes and such. Additional elements are taken from classical architecture, including columns, floorplans and wallpaper patterns. She combines the skill of a medical or botanical illustrator with the soul of a poet to make extremely detailed drawings that are nothing if not evocative.

But evocative of what?

The inability to pin down exactly what this work is about is, in fact, a large part of what the work is about. Schooled in classical Europe, then living in postmodernist America, Softic appears to be using her art as a laboratory for working out this aesthetic and cultural dichotomy. Again, her statement is instructive, as she writes, “I aim to reconcile aesthetic ideas and pictorial approaches that are cast as opposites in most of contemporary art theory and criticism.” She then goes on to describe her works as reflecting both “the traditional visual arts of [her] native Bosnia and Herzegovina” and “the experience of living in the fragmented, layered, constantly changing culture.”

These contrasts are present in the work, as is the sense of them being more about process than about any clearly intended meaning. In the hands of a lesser-skilled artist, this could be the formula for disaster, but Softic pulls it off. In effect, she has seduced us into her world of dreamlike confusion, using soft color and layered texture and careful crosshatching on a grand scale, taking us to a place where a sweet potato and its root system is comparable to a human heart and its blood vessels, and an unfolding flower has its equivalents in the form of a section of a Moorish column and the symmetrical shape of a woman’s reproductive organs.

Softic has put her memories and ruminations on view, but she does not sensationalize or preach. She says, “I look at and feel my personal and cultural history and [yet, it] is in another world.” Looking at her work or reading it or, as I prefer, feeling it, presents an opportunity to explore her touchpoints—in moments of recognition perhaps we will become better acquainted with our own.

The gallery has been painted a soft slate blue to set off the unframed drawings, which are worked edge to edge and held to the walls with pushpins stuck through little attached tabs. Considering that the three largest are each about 6 and a half feet by 12 and a half feet, this is an effective means of presentation; the color choice for the background works well—even in the academic arena, no longer are gallery walls expected to be pure white, and I say thank goodness for that.

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Brattleboro Museum and Art Center/Brattleboro:
You Can't Go Home Again: Art In Exile
by Robert F. Smith
Art New England 20 no6 46 O/N 1999

How exile from one's homeland both infuses and haunts the artist is the theme of this powerful exhibition, which focuses upon the work of five exiled artists, all now living in the U.S. Ilya Kabakov, who emigrated from Russia in 1989, is perhaps the best known of the group. At ten, Vietnamese artist Dinh Q. Le was forced to flee his homeland when his border village was overrun by the Khmer Rouge. Wlodzimierz Ksiazek left Poland in 1982, on the run from a repressive government intent on destroying the Solidarity movement. Uruguayan artist Ana Tiscornia spent thirteen years as an adult under a right-wing dictatorship before leaving Uruguay. Tanja Softic came to the United States from Sarajevo to attend graduate school, and war in her homeland has kept her here ever since.

Guest curator Amy Schlegel designed the show's layout brilliantly, juxtaposing diverse work to great advantage. Ksiazek's massive, nearly sculptural abstract oil paintings — like looking down from space on an archaeological ruin — are set next to the page-sized, framed panels of one of Kabakov's elegantly drawn albums that he produced secretly in Moscow in the early '70s. Kabakov's installation reflects the stifling loss of privacy, intimacy, and individuality under Soviet communal living, where as many as fifteen families might share one small apartment. In response, the characters in Kabakov's drawings dream, or lock themselves in closets, or fly away, or simply disappear.

Tiscornia's Thirteen Portraits are photographs of anonymous "disappeared" civilian victims of the Uruguayan dictatorship. The silkscreened portraits are seen through frosted plastic, giving them a blurred but recognizable appearance from a distance that draws one in for a better look, only to find that, up close, the faces almost disappear. Le uses an ancient grass-mat style he learned as a child to weave together his own color photographs of Buddhist temple relief sculptures with black-and-white photographs the Khmer Rouge took of "killing field" victims. From a distance the victims' faces are an invisible part of the weaving, but moving closer the dozens of faces jump out from the background. Both sets of photographs have great emotional power and a terrifying poignancy.

Softic's serial drawings seem, in contrast, safe and familiar; but these remembered objects, reflections of her childhood and homeland — the husk of a seed, a gourd, the dried flower of a plant — represent that which is emptied, hollow, and cast off, and in their own way are as disturbing as the other works. Together, these five artists provide a varied, beautiful, and at times haunting vision of what it means both to lose one's home and to struggle to create a new one.

(Reprinted with permission of Art New England.)

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