My approach to making art engages an interdisciplinary practice and involves working in different mediums.  I utilize scraps or remnants of clothing, fabric, and pattern layered together with fragments of history and text that allow me to examine gender implications regarding expectations, as well as the construct of femininity.  These fragments are ephemeral yet enduring.  They allow the gaze to come into question.  I create work that explores, deconstructs, and reconstructs the female body.  I choose the female as subject matter because I am a woman and I know the female body best.  My figurative art draws upon my point of view, life experience, and upbringing.  Ultimately, my work is the result of having a vulnerable and female position in life and an emotional connection to the subject matter.  The images I create (regardless of medium or intention) contain elements of pathos, darkness, resilience, brokenness, fragmentation, distortion, fragility, and references to bruising upon the surface of the skin along with the grounding forces of femininity, vulnerability, and strength.  

Luminous Bodies will allow me to work with the female body, using its form as a surface to display and exhibit my research of different patterns, texture, and text. I will showcase my creative explorations using various forms of media to project, superimpose, transfer, embed, tattoo, and imprint. The female form will be transformed and reimagined specifically to create a visual and emotional impact.

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Tia-Maria Soroskie is a Canadian multidisciplinary artist who creates work that speaks to the presence and/or absence of the female body and female space(s), and that examines how the female body is defined, confined, bound and shaped.  Tia-Maria holds a MFA in Drawing and Installation from Washington State University (2005).  Her art has been exhibited nationwide and in juried shows internationally which include a solo exhibition in British Columbia at the Alternator Centre for Contemporary Art, a group show at the Woman Made Gallery in Chicago, and more recently, group shows in Romania and New York City through Dacia Gallery.  Her work is included in the permanent collection of The University of British Columbia Okanagan (President’s Purchase Award) and in private collections.  She lives and creates in Kelowna, British Columbia, Canada.