Chakras

Energy, flows and passions: Irma Sofia Poeter and feminine recovered

Norma Iglesias-Prieto, Sep.6, 2014

The exhibition “Chakras: woven energies” has the strength and the virtue of showing in an articulated way the many personal and professional dimensions of Irma Sofia Poeter. Her interests are deep and appeal to a reflection and recovery of the basics from the feminine, a rich critical return toward the only thing that gives us true strength: the creative energy.

In this exhibition, the artist stiches a “patchwork” of her life, experiences, passions and materials with high energy and symbolic content. She incorporates her spiritual practice and her interest in the seven chakras, including her fascination and domain of fashion design, as well as her attraction to textiles and everything that they contain and signify. Attraction that is linked both to the aesthetic, anthropological, as experiential.

From the aesthetic, Irma Sofia juxtaposes materials in a variety of textures, densities, ways of production, times, cultures and countries. She also inpregnates them with the essence that harmonizes with the respective chakra. The juxtaposition of materials releases the artist but provokes and reveals our own socio-cultural prejudices.

From the anthropological, the handling of textiles enable her to track the dynamics of life and work of those who produce them, as well as granting symbolic value, recognition and dignity both to the subject (predominantly female) that produces it as to their ways of working.

From the experiential, fabrics, textiles, the design of the patterns and the act of sewing, refer to her childhood, to the memories of her mother and the talks of how her grandmother used to sew. The textures, shapes, densities, smells and colors of the fabrics and textiles that she encounters at a store or at a market, connects her with a moment and condition of life. Each fabric is associated to a memory. The fabrics would refer to her also to the power and the pleasure of the transformation of an object more or less simple (a piece of cloth) to one much more complex (the garment), as well as to the empowerment in the act of dressing, the adorning and transformation of a body, the stressing of postures, generating styles, creating fashion and sending signals.

For Irma Sofia, fabrics, textiles ethnic and typical costumes have become the means and the raw material of her artistic production. With them, she tells stories and captures her deepest concerns. Each of the seven outfits is based on the ancient and simple geometric figure of the rectangle, so used in the traditional fashion of all times and all places. The rectangle form can be observed in a huipil, a kimono, shawl, a sari, a rebozo or a haouli (an African turban).

The artist decides to present the garments on a runway (either live or in video- as circumstances permit). In this way, the attires exceed the dimension of being a single artistic object of contemplation, to become an experience making the energy of the multiple subjects and objects involved circulate and transform.