Sofia Enriquez

SOFIA ENRIQUEZ, MISMO, 2019
LOCALLY-BASED ARTIST AND FASHION DESIGNER SOFIA ENRIQUEZ GOES THREE-DIMENSIONAL WITH A GARDEN OF SIX MASSIVE PAISLEYS — ONE OF THE MOTIFS IN THE GRAPHIC VOCABULARY SHE USES ON HER CANVASES AND MURALS, AS WELL AS HER LINE OF UPCYCLED CLOTHING THAT SHE SELLS UNDER THE LABEL MUCHO. “EVERYBODY WEARS PAISLEYS: GUYS, GIRLS, YOUNG PEOPLE AND OLD PEOPLE, AND PEOPLE OF DIFFERENT CULTURES,” ENRIQUEZ SAYS. “IT CAN BE FOUND ON A COTTON BANDANA WORN BY SOMEONE DOING MANUAL LABOR TO SOMEONE WEARING A BUSINESS SUIT WITH A SILK TIE. IT’S A SYMBOL THAT MAKES THE EQUALITY IN PEOPLE STAND OUT,” WHICH IS A THEME THAT RUNS THROUGH ALL OF THE ARTIST’S WORK. THE PAISLEYS, WHICH ARE CONSTRUCTED WITH WOOD AND RANGE IN HEIGHT FROM FOURTEEN TO EIGHTEEN FEET, READ LIKE DOUBLE-SIDED PAINTINGS AND ARE PAINTED IN BRIGHT, BOLD COLORS TO CONTRAST WITH THE DESERT’S MUTED AND PASTEL TONES. THE SCULPTURE IN THE CENTER OF THE GARDEN HAS A PLATFORM WITH LARGE STEPS WHERE FESTIVAL GOERS CAN MEET AND RELAX — AND POSSIBLY GLIMPSE MODELS WEARING MUCHO CLOTHING.

Sofia Enriquez has been processing her life through art for as long as she can remember. Her first encounter with art came wrapped in the Roman Catholic Church where, as a young girl, she fell entranced with religious iconography and the androgynous faces of its portraits and devotional art.
When she was ten, a pivotal event would carve her own course through art. After heading to church for regular weekly mass one Sunday, and learning that it had been cancelled, her family was hit by a drunk driver on the way home. The accident made Sofia question her perception of God in a very dark way as she began to ponder the meaning of life. Her faith became steeped in the known, rather than the unknown.
She began to mine her surroundings, her life, and her passions to build a personal iconography, creating artworks with these motifs to express her own unique view of the world. This view evolved to include the bold and energetic styling of youth street culture that infused her upbringing in Cathedral City, California; a nod to the plump graphic lettering of graffiti; the recurrent paisleys that she would find in both rich and poor homes growing up that weaved an ironic connection between people despite their economic barriers; and the bright and vivid hues of traditional Mexican mural art.
After attending the Otis College of Art and Design, Sofia would return to her desert home. While working side jobs with her mother as a maid, she was given a donation of clothing from one of their clients. Grateful for the clothing, but not entirely in love with the fashions for their own sake, Sofia started to paint them, lavishing them with her dynamic, signature vocabulary, each piece becoming an individual work of art.
The line was called MUCHO and upon placing it online, the line sold out almost immediately.
I wanted to start painting as way to express my emotions through imagery.
I don’t understand minimalism. I like the idea of taking up space on a canvas-of filling it edge to edge-and covering, layering, erasing, creating imagery on top of imagery. I’m building up and unearthing my own
vocabulary of icons.j
-Sofia Enriquez
16

I’ve been following Sofia’s career and creative process for several years now and I’ve collected a number of her works. I am honored that her first ever solo show is happening here in the Coachella Valley at PKS3 Studio. Jy
-Phillip K. Smith III
Ever industrious, and built of a mighty work ethic, Sofia continued to make art for public consumption. For the next half decade, she painted over 39 murals from which a populist, feminist, pro-equality message would emerge, weaving her high-energy palette throughout the Coachella Valley and Southern California, even touching upon Baja, California.
In 2019, Sofia experienced an artist’s dream come true when she was offered a coveted space on the grounds of the annual Coachella Valley Music and Arts festival, where she was able to bring her beloved paisley into three dimensional, larger than life fruition. The installation
“MISMO” (“same” in Spanish) featured six massive wooden murals in the universally recognized amoebic shape, painted with the artist’s usual pictorial lexicon. During the event, friends modeled MUCHO clothes on the base of the sculptures.
Now, at 27, Sofia’s diving deep with a new body of paintings that belie the maturity of a woman stepping into her own vulnerability. What has unfurled is a sort of street surrealism wrapped in the symbolism of her life lived thus far. Grand scale canvases that express,
“This is what
I feel like and have felt.” Much like her murals, the works are dense with imagery. “I try to cover every inch,” she states. “I don’t understand minimalism having grown up poor and always wanting abundance.” These subconscious self-portraits, guided by a rampantly colorful memory, provide fodder to be perpetually mined by the artist for clarity, understanding, and refinement of mission. For instance, in one piece she paints about an experience in which she suffered severe back pain.
She wanted to see it as a visual, rather than a feeling, and to present it in paint rather than keep it inside as a compartmentalized memory.
A house covered by a ray of red light symbolizes a recurring nightmare since childhood in which Sofia was trapped in a large Victorian house where everything was dark and nothing worked properly; a common motif in fears of abandonment. A lone dog becomes an avatar for the artist and her feverish work ethic. Spanish and English words appear:
DEJALO (leave it alone) sidles up next to CONTROL, representing the eternal battle and waffling insecurities in the process of art making.
These works are compilations of the emotional experience Sofia has ridden these last three years, a sincere dissection of who she is and what she is doing.
After this foray into her soul, Sofia plans on taking her work back out into the physical environment where she will build interactive worlds, alive with her distinct artistic characteristics that people can be a part of and commune within.