Sofia Maria Paz

Sofia Maria Paz is an Argentine-American artist and MFA printmaking graduate from Arizona State University, where she received GPSA's Teaching Excellence Award. Her art has been exhibited internationally at the Duoro Biennial in Portugal, SGCI's annual printmaking conference, and is the two-year award winner of Speedball's New Impressions national competition. 

At Pyracantha Press, she collaborated with Professor Emeritus, John Risseeuw, as his research assistant on numerous cross-disciplinary projects alongside cosmologist, Dr. Laurence Krauss, philosopher Cheshire Calhoun, and Dr. Aditi Chattopadhyay from ASU's AIMS Center. As an invited artist, Paz also joined Eric Avery, Tim High, Karen Kunc, and others in the Semographics III mono-printing marathon of 2017. Fractured Memory, Paz's most recent series, discusses the relationship between reality and fiction in order to depict the struggle of childhood memory consolidation, alongside its post-traumatic effects on growth into adulthood. These concepts are formally applied through the art of photo compositing. 

Echoing the multifaceted nature of memory, each piece is made by superimposing visual elements from diverse sources in Photoshop—including 18th-century art, social media, 1970's horror films, fairy tales, children's drawings, personal texts, and crime scene photography. Fractured Memory bridges the gap between past and present imagery in order to spark a conversation and build a relationship with the viewer, the narrative, and the victim.