Studio Visit with My Amazing Teaching Assistant, Sophia!
Glad to be able to sound off on her recent work before it was put away. What an amazing show. Thank you to our students for holding forth so helpfully and insightfully.
That’s our Artist!
Check out her website.
And check out her work…
…
And her bio, which she read to us:
We are all afflicted. We are a bunch of busy hurting people hoping for love. We forget that the world is full of suffering people and this makes it hard to have compassion for each other and ourselves.
My name is Sophia Kayafas, living in New York, and currently working on a new body of narratives exploring the vibrant and emotive qualities of paint. This year, an epic figurative narrative with plenty of personal religious baggage has managed to unravel itself in my studio and has left me with an abstracted kaleidoscope of concepts and experiences - in other words- a fleeting clarity.
Absurd imagery allows me to release anxieties with humor and storytelling of a grand and theatrical nature. I use confronting spiritual space evocative of Byzantine iconography in Orthodox Christian churches to discuss the age-old contradictions of the human and divine.
I explore my desperation for faith with an awareness of the absurdity of it all. Spiritual vulnerability, affliction of doubt, subconscious discovery, cultural identity, prayer, empathy, sexuality and violence coexist in a secret and sophisticated spiritual battlefield where humans, demons, angels, and saints are vividly alive.
–Sophia Kayafas
