During the past year, the uncanny confluence of elections, uprisings, long-overdue racial reckonings, wildfires, and pandemic have upended the way we see and interact with the world on a daily basis. Shelter in place has challenged artists to work differently—on a more domestic scale, without collaborators, with accessible materials, and in new digital presentation formats.

In response to this moment of upheaval, artist Sofía Córdova presents SOBRE/ON, a three-part, meandering inquiry into the artistic process as a constantly shifting form of inquest without mastery. Experimental by design and necessity, SOBRE/ON unfolds in three parts. At each event, Córdova will traipse through a reoccurring territory in her practice now altered by the realities of 2020—materiality, international Blackness, and nature/wilderness—mining the uneasy openness and vulnerability of artistic process as it merges with life, philosophy, and new parenthood.

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Born in Puerto Rico and currently based in Oakland, Sofía Córdova makes work that considers sci-fi as alternative history, dance music’s liberatory potential, the internet, colonial contamination, mystical objects, and extinction and mutation as evolutionary forces, all within the matrix of class, gender, late capitalism, and its technologies. She is one half of the music duo XUXA SANTAMARIA.

SOBRE/ON is SJMA’s first digital artist commission.

The project continues with SOBRE/ON parts 2 and 3 on Thursday February 11 and 18, 4pm.

Support

This project is made possible with support from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation.

Programs at the San José Museum of Art are made possible by generous support from the Museum's Board of Trustees, a Cultural Affairs Grant from the City of San José, the Lipman Family Foundation, Yvonne and Mike Nevens, Facebook Art Department, the Richard A. Karp Charitable Foundation, The David and Lucile Packard Foundation, Adobe, Yellow Chair Foundation, the SJMA Director's Council and Council of 100, the San José Museum of Art Endowment Fund established by the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation at the Silicon Valley Community Foundation, and The William Randolph Hearst Foundation.