Sophia Szilagyi was recently featured in the Spring 2023 edition of Imprint Magazine. As Australia’s only quarterly magazine dedicated to printmaking, Imprint Magazine engages in meaningful and diverse conversations about contemporary printmaking. Analysing a single work of Sophia’s from the Print Council of Australia's archives entitled Where Shadows Lie, author Lesley Duxbury investigates the complex poetics of this haunting yet delicate diptych. The artwork, originally commissioned by the PCA, features two images; one of an eye and the other of a shadowy forest. The diptych is described as possessing a “haunting familiarity” that explore the duality of life.
Duxbury begins by discussing the symbolic power of shadows within Sophia’s work, comparing her use of light and dark to the allegory of Plato’s cave; “like the inhabitants of Plato’s cave, only a hint of reality is revealed…in the realm of shadows where our eyes play tricks on us, imagination replaces reason.”
Duxbury celebrates Sophia’s ability to subvert traditional ideas that associate shadows with the darker side of the human psyche, instead creating imagined worlds that invoke different emotions. Sophia’s work materialise the idea that “things are not always what they seem.”
The skill with which Sophia constructs her imagined versions of reality are also highlighted. Duxbury comments on how Sophia’s practice implements an element of fantasy to a medium that is typically ascribed with visual truth. She concludes how Sophia’s diptych “brings together in a single image compelling dualities that persist over time urging us to never take things at face value, especially during dusk and dawn.”
October 18, 2023
