Photo courtesy of Sofía Gabriel
Open Lab: Sofía Gabriel
Cíclos by Sofía Fernández Díaz and Sofía Gabriel
Open Labs offer a flexible platform for artists to share, test ideas, and develop perspective on their work through community exchange.
Limited capacity. Advanced registration is appreciated.
Cíclos is an immersive action (an experiment), by Sofía Fernández Díaz and Sofía Gabriel that plays with the idea of performance as a ritual to honor the innate female connection with nature. This ritual invites the audience to sit around the performers, listen, observe, and experience the flow of improvisation.
Cíclos is an ode to the moon that celebrates life, changes, and process. A dialogue with intuition and symbolism that leaves traces on a canvas. A painting in motion. A live performance of gestures, ancestral traditions, natural materials, and tools.
About the Artists
Sofía Gabriel (she/her) studied and taught classical dance for more than twenty years in Mexico. She holds a BA in Management and Cultural Studies from the University of Claustro de Sor Juana, and an MA in Arts Administration and Policy from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where she was active in the Performance Department under the mentorship of Maria Gaspar and Roberto Sifuentes. She has presented her ongoing digital project, titled "The Feminist Collective Body in the Americas: Living Archive", of interviews and feminist practices by figures such as the Collective LasTesis and the Mexican artist Tania Candiani, in Chile at the international virtual conference “Construir lo común” organized by Núcleo Milenio de Arte, Performatividad y Activismo. She has additionally collaborated in different capacities with the University Museum of Contemporary Art, the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM) the Field Foundation of Illinois, the Hyde Park Jazz Festival, and the Hyde Park Art Center. She has produced and curated festivals and exhibitions at SAIC Galleries, High Concept Labs, and UNAM Chicago.
Sofía Fernández Díaz (she/her) is a multidisciplinary artist from Mexico City searching for the hidden relationships between everything around us. Her process is fueled by an intimate knowledge of both ancient and modern processes, combining experimentation, intuition, and play to discover unexpected commonalities between unrelated materials. Her familiarity with naturally occurring patterns and formations allows her to recreate these systems in her work using beeswax, fibers, natural dyes and many other materials to form immediate, visceral connections with her viewers.
Sofía arrived in Chicago after receiving the Joan Livingston scholarship to earn her MFA in Fiber and Material Studies at SAIC. After graduating, she was selected to receive a Spark grant by Chicago Artist Coalition and invited to hold a 2023 Radicle Studio Residency at Hyde Park Art Center. She previously earned a BFA in Painting and Printmaking from the Academy of Art University in San Francisco and a degree in Art Anthropology from CIESAS in Mexico City.
In addition to being exhibited, published, and collected both nationally and internationally, Sofía has spent more than a decade exchanging ideas with artisans across Mexico, sharing her documentation and intimate knowledge of their processes and daily rituals through workshops on natural pigments and dyeing.
Access Services
To learn more about the accessibility of our studio, please review our Access Information. For any other questions or requests regarding accessibility, please contact Angee Lennard, HCL’s Accessibility Coordinator, at angee@highconceptlabs.org or 312-374-1117.
Presented by High Concept Labs and the Monira Foundation in Joint Residency at Mana Contemporary.