Sonia Payes – Alchemy

Photography & Sculpture Exhibition

8-22 AUG
SOHOgalleries , Woollahra

Sonia Payes – a multi-disciplinary artist creating photography, sculpture, video and installation examining the intersections between landscape and the body, the feminine and the natural.

Sonia Payes is confronting the challenge of restoring balance to our relationship with our host planet. Bringing together her photographic works, and the sculptural work that has developed from it, she documents the impact of human intervention on the planet and provides a vision of a possible future.

Hybridity is an integral part of Payes’s artistic practice, and over her professional career, she has combined her foundational photographic work with digital imagery, 3D technologies, animated film, and sculpture. In this exhibition, she continues to blur categorical distinctions, bringing together her photographic works and the sculptural work that has developed from it as a way of interrogating these key questions confronting the human species.

Initially true to the process of capturing her world solely through a camera lens, the images of her daughter Ilona re-emerge in her new works to explore the theme of humanity’s responsibility to protect our planet. Payes transforms her daughter’s facial likeness into what Daniel Pateman calls “a digital avatar” who stands in for all of us as we undertake the process of reintegration and re-engagement with our planet. Emerging from the ocean, the sky and a variety of verdant landscapes, her haunting image speaks eloquently of our plight while offering hope for a re-imagined future.

Alchemy – Photography Series

Taking just one human face – a photograph of her daughter – Sonia offers a multitude of possibilities, transforming that one picture through manipulation of colour, form and texture.

Her digital photographic prints, light installations and bronze sculptures spring from that single-origin image, and in this exhibition, it becomes much more than the familiar face of a family member. Rather it is a symbol of humanity in its broadest sense, as Payes grapples to harness her response to the big issues facing all of us.

These universal themes emerge in the Alchemy series at the heart of this exhibition – a stunning sequence of 14 photographic prints of that face, each with bold shifts in colour and showing exquisite detail in the variation in line, shape and layering. Altered, however, are their colour palette, contrast, brightness and tone, so that every individual image bestows a radically different impression. They’re thrillingly reminiscent of Andy Warhol’s 1967 Marilyn Monroe Portfolio, but without sacrificing anything of Payes’s elemental aesthetic. Superimposing the organic pattern of an ice floe over the opaque, angular features of the digital avatar, their qualities combine to create a perceptible landscape. The electric array of colour employed – fiery red magmas, mud-rust browns, and radioactive yellows and greens – result in palpably dystopian visions of Earth as prophesied by an omnipotent divinity.

The striking images are of an obviously human form but the decision to print them on metallic paper and to use such a kaleidoscope of iridescent colours suggests something different. If not quite an artificial life form, then perhaps a human who is altered by the changes in their environment.

Payes is known for incorporating themes around climate change into her sculptural and photographic work but this collection, produced amid a global pandemic, feels like it extends that idea to explore the ways humanity has to evolve to adapt to a different sort of existential threat.

This transforms the message in her work from a theoretical, universal commentary to one that is deeply personal. This single face may be an archetype, representing humanity as a whole but it is also an expression of family and the most important connections of all.

The repetition of this image of a face in various forms throughout the exhibition space makes a powerful statement about our resilience. We are surrounded by constant reminders of the threats we face, but the overriding impression from “Alchemy” is that something positive can be forged from the heat of adversity – that individually and collectively we are capable of better.

Sculpture

Woman
Payes’ multi-directional faces, arise to greater heights from out the earth, perceiving 360 degrees of horizon expressing the omnipresence and immanence of deified nature. “A humanizing focus within the theme of regeneration is my recurring focus of a portrait image of my daughter, Ilana – an iconic element that in certain works morphs into a four-faced warrior or in others, becomes a hybrid automaton of the future.”

Emergence

Payes continues to explore the entwined relationship between mankind and nature with surreal Emergence sculpture.

“The tough metal bronze inverted faces demonstrate a stoic adaptability to change, personifying humanity’s innate connection to the natural world, the impact human-induced global warming is having on the environment and to further elucidate the concerns underpinning Payes’s art: those of perpetual change, the reciprocity between all living beings, nature’s regenerative cycles, and a faith in humanity’s ability to adapt to environmental upheaval.”