Photo credit: Raquel Pérez Puig
Sofía del Mar Collins (b.1995, San Juan, PR) creates projects across painting, drawing, soft sculpture, installation, video, and performance. To turn into rain and fall again is her most recent solo exhibition at Rachel Uffner Gallery (New York, NY, 2024) following Nadie in casa her first solo show (Souvenir 154, San Juan, PR, 2023) after completing her MFA in Studio Art at Hunter College (2021). Recent exhibitions include participations in MECAnismos (Souvenir 154, Santo Domingo, D.R, 2024), Cortar, Coser, Quebrar, Cuidar, Quemar (Souvenir 154 satellite exhibition in Casa Aboy, San Juan, Puerto Rico, 2024), Tamo Aquí/We here (Embajada, San Juan, Puerto Rico, 2022), En busca del paisaje perdido (El Nuevo Hidrante, San Juan, Puerto Rico, 2022), Extra Terrestrial (Rachel Uffner Gallery, New York, NY, 2022), Paadmaan Video Event Edition #2, curated by Foad Alijani and Greg Leshé (Sharif Gallery, Tehran, Iran, 2021), Reclamar el Suelo, Declamar la Tierra, curated by Arte-Suelo-Ser, (Hidrante, San Juan, PR, 2021), Common Ground, (Children Museum of the Arts, New York, NY, 2019-2020), and Endless Editions Biennial: Optimism curated by Lukaza Branfman-Verissimo (EFA Project Space, New York, NY, 2018). Sofia graduated with the Geraldine Putnam Prize for Visual Arts (2017) from Sarah Lawrence College, where she concentrated BA studies in Sociology and Visual Arts. Sofía currently lives and works in San Juan, PR.
In dreaming while making, I search to connect with the past, find resiliency in the present, and set in motion perspectives for an adaptable, sensible, and yet suspicious future. While painting in the expanded sense serves as a primary site for the emergence of image-sensations, textile processes, such as sewing, embroidery, dying with natural pigments, and weaving make their presence throughout my practice.
I am interested in blurring differences between craft and fine art mediums, as well as modes of perceiving the relationships of nature and industry. A growing practice of working with both synthetic and natural fibers moves me to trace social histories and embrace the poetic potentials embedded in diverse surfaces. Grounded in the exchange of place and spirit, my projects engage spatial dynamics and material circularities where boundaries between the birth and decay of images flood from bodily affect towards a changing, interstitial landscape.