The Color of Arts
Artist Lisa C Soto: Relational Undercurrents at molaa
Lisa C Soto was born in Los Angeles, CA, grew up in New York City and in a small traditional village in the South of Spain, across the waters from Morocco. Soto explains that “Her Caribbean heritage and continuous movements between continents and islands have informed her themes, providing her a unique, global perspective.” Lisa C Soto is one of the artists at the Museum of Latin American Art (molaa) exhibition in Long Beach, Relational Undercurrents: Contemporary Art of the Caribbean Archipelago. Her installation on display is called, Relational Realities / Realidades Relacionales, 2017.
Lisa C Soto (United States / Estados Unidos, b. 1969) Relational Realities / Realidades relacionales, 2017 Mixed media, variable dimensions / Medios mixtos, dimensiones variables Courtesy of the artist / Cortesía del artista
The Lisa C Soto Interview
PalacioMagazine.com spoke with Lisa C Soto about her art installation which resembles an almost spidery web of interconnected spokes and wires. Step back from it and you swear you see a galaxy in a faraway corner of the universe.
The Lisa C Soto Artist Statement
“My drawings, installations, and sculptures embody the struggle between connections and disconnections. Supporting the belief that all things, seen and unseen are essentially linked. There is a conversation that includes a personal and a universal situation, an interplay between the micro and the macro. Questioning our endless conflicts, our creation of artificial differences, and our establishment of borders. While exploring the essence of the forces at work in the macrocosm. Shaping what those energies, frequencies, and vibrations might look like.
I base my aesthetic on a tension poised between fragility and strength. Transforming industrial materials such as wire, bullet shells, Mylar, hardware, wire mesh and mirrors into an ephemeral and delicate grid and web-like systems. Providing an experiential quality to the installations through the incorporation of sound and motion. References are derived from cartographic lines, to the network of the cosmos to the neurons and synapses of the brain. Forms suggesting swarms, nests, webs, and geometrical shapes are used to explore our shifting, transgressing and fluctuating behaviors. Relating to systems of communication and universal principles in order to question society’s conflicts and violence, while highlighting its harmonious network.
In the end, the work strives to convey an experience of the energy transmitted by our global and intimate relationships.
– Lisa C Soto
The Exhibition at molaa
The exhibition at molaa runs until February 25, 2018, and features over 80 artists with roots in Haiti, the Dominican Republic, Cuba, Puerto Rico, Curaçao, Aruba, St. Martin, Martinique, Guadeloupe, Trinidad and Tobago, Jamaica, the Bahamas, and Barbados. Relational Undercurrents is supported by grants from the Getty Foundation as part of their Pacific Standard Time: LA/LA, a self-described “…far reaching and ambitious exploration of Latin American and Latino art in dialogue with Los Angeles.” Pacific Standard Time is being held at more than 70 cultural institutions across Southern California. molaa.org
