THE INNER FOREST: A CARTOGRAPHY FOR DETOXIFYING THE PRESENT

During her three-month residency at LAGOS, Mexico City, Canadian artist Sophie Brackett, who is of Jewish descent, has gone through a seminal experience: establishing her artistic practice and her first studio outside the academic frameworks of the university. Sustained by a deep inclination toward painting and an acute search for her position within contemporary practice, Sophie's particular process unfolds from a singular sensibility. Her way of being in the world is closely tied to her neurodivergent cognition and to a particular auditory reasoning that gives her production a rhythm of its own, distancing it from the accelerated and demanding dimension of the commercial contemporary art circuit. In recognizing that this dizzying tempo does not belong to her, Brackett's work can be situated from the perspective of an outsider artist. Her gestures, her rich inner world, and her deep connection to an otherness of perception shape a profoundly interiorized cognitive process, entirely removed from the demand for speed and immediacy imposed by dominant structures.

Nourished by a deep passion for figures such as Frida Kahlo, Leonora Carrington, and a lineage of women painters in which active imagination stands as a vital condition, her work invites us to engage with credible possibilities, images, and sensory impacts that encourage viewers to find a place of their own. Her pieces also operate as a necessary offset for detoxifying from the bustle of screens, cell phones, exacerbated consumption, and the utilitarian logic of production and of being a product that social media imposes on us.

The works made during this period resonate with an atmosphere of three moons and Shakespearean tints: a deep interiorization of the self that cohabits with the mythical time of the forest, populated by dual characters and hybrid entities in which the animal and the human merge, celebrating a free and embodied sexuality that reclaims the pleasure of recognizing ourselves outside of any oppressive system. In parallel, other pieces display a powerful self-referentiality in which the vagina appears as a portal, magical space, and energy node, interweaving bodies and jewels in a self-portrait that maintains a critical gaze, suspended between the exploration of parallel worlds and a firm grounding with feet on the earth.

Finally, as Sophie deepened her engagement with painting, during this residency the artist also developed a taste for photography and the practice of intervening in it. Through this technical crossover, Brackett manages to connect the pulse of everyday life observed on the streets of Mexico City with her personal and imaginary universe, allowing fractures to be reconciled through units of high imaginative sensitivity.

olgaMargarita dávila

Chief Curator

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