I Ate My Poem

Sofia Macht, MFA 2023, Painting

Sofia Macht’s thesis presentation is an affective bibliography through which the artist collects historical autotheoretical texts written by women. These are critical texts, oriented around a pragmatic use of the self as material. The exhibition is anchored by four works on paper which reference Violette Leduc’s “La Batarde” (1964) and Clarice Lispector’s “The Hour of the Star” (1977). The paper is prepared so that it mimics a book cover – waxy with a slight sheen, and a spine down the middle. The surfaces of these works are permeable membranes: graphite is nudged into paper, coated paper is carved away revealing its soft, bright, raw interior, paint is laid down in varying levels of transparency. Images bloom out of each other through a material layering which recalls the experience of thinking with a book. These pseudo covers conjure the intimate, lush, notational spaces of the margin, where language is worked out through sensual-cerebral processes of analogy and translation. These works are mirrors between the referential and the subjective.

Macht is the primary subject of the work, though she approaches herself indirectly through a veil of associations. Rather than present a likeness or a coherent identity, she plays with the screen through which she has been constructed as a subject.