Arts

Softić (pronounced “Softich”) hails from Sarajevo. She came to the U.S. in 1989 to attend graduate school. She had always intended to return to Sarajevo, but the Bosnian civil war, which ironically commenced the very day she was defending her thesis at Old Dominion University, prevented that. Fortunately, she had secured a teaching position at Rollins College in Florida, where she remained for eight years. In 2000, she came to the University of Richmond to develop its printmaking program.

These days, she is an American citizen and very much settled in this country. But having “transitioned through three citizenships in addition to one period of being a citizen of no country,” as she puts it, she experiences what the late writer Edward Said called “the contrapuntal reality [of an exile].” Her work reflects this cultural hybridity. It’s multi-layered and dense, expressing the aggregate, polyphonic experience of the immigrant in which constant adaption and change is the norm.

“The visual vocabulary of my drawings and prints suggests a displaced existence: fragmented memories, adaptation, revival and transformation,” she says. “Because I do not live and work within the comfort or boundaries of the culture in which I first learned to observe, interpret and engage the world, I have the arguable privilege of having lived more than one life.”

Softić’s works are elegant and lyrical. There’s a delicacy about them that is distinctly feminine—you would never mistake them for the work of a male—but there is also a potent strength. Using a science-based iconography, she borrows from botany, ornithology, entomology and astronomy, connecting images much like a poet connects words, playing with the symbolic and structural connections between them. Softić’s works possess a cartographical quality, as if with them she is charting the course through memory and identity. Softić says she’s drawn to radiating structures; in one print Queen Anne’s lace, the joists and rafters of one of the Jefferson pools in Warm Springs and a schematic rendering of a black hole appear. These are items that seem so foreign to one another, but in Softić’s hands they achieve a kind of symmetry even as they express the “awareness of simultaneous dimensions” that is the exile’s experience.