OTOMYS: How do you understand the concept of Becoming in relation to your artistic practice?
Sophia Szilagyi: Becoming is such a rich and evocative word that lends itself to describing the way many artists practice. As I understand it, the word is tied to the conscious act of making - transforming an idea into something physical. To make real a thought or feeling, it is the essence of what is always inevitable. It implies the passing of time and the process of creativity which is active in a constant state of flux. In my own practice, the focus on the natural world and landscape has been an ideal vessel to express these movements, shifts, and changes that are both physical and internal.
OTOMYS: How does your vision of the future shape your relationship to the present and vice versa? Your use of layering creates artworks that are situated in the future, but very much tethered to past and present. How do you harness the medium of photography to create stories about transformation?
Sophia Szilagyi: My sense of the future seems unknowable which I find both beautiful and frightening. I am aware that one minute can be fine and in the next moment a life can be changed forever. I do not have a pessimistic view of the future, nor am I overly nostalgic for the past, though I am aware that both are inherent in my view of the world. I’m very much interested in the way the agility of memory can flood the present and enhance or affect the reading of now. In light of this, I would argue both past and future are in constant dialogue. The images that I make are a way for me to engage with this dialogue, and to soften and make recognisable, the edges of the present.
OTOMYS: Change and growth are central themes in each of your artistic practices, what keeps you returning to this concept?
Sophia Szilagyi: Change and growth provide agency of expression and magnify the drive to create.
OTOMYS: What are you intending to evoke through the artworks you have created for Becoming?
Sophia Szilagyi: I use the photographic image as a way of harnessing my experience of the world. It provides a blueprint which I then add to. My work relies on many photographic sensibilities including the very act of looking and: or capturing a precise location in time. But I am not interested in remaining there. I would like to invite anyone looking at my work to bring their own story and or memories of time and place to the experience. The beauty of photography is its uncanny ability to document the world around us as we see it, but not always as we feel it. This allusiveness, this feeling, is something that I am very fascinated by and if I was to invoke anything intentionally, I would say it is located in this quasi space called ’feeling’.
February 29, 2024
