SOPHIA BOROWSKA - LOT

Lot responds to urban landscape and renewal as they affect the body’s sensorial memory and perception of a place. A contested site in Montréal is investigated through materiality, process, attachment, and mischief.

The Omnipac Building was an abandoned cardboard box factory at the intersection of Avenues du Parc and Van Horne in Montréal with an intense brutalist presence. It was demolished in 2014, and the lot has remained vacant while rumours circulate about redevelopment plans.

Gravel, puddles, broken glass, trash, and mounds of snow and dirt now make up the textures and visual field of the Omnipac site. Lot re-investigates such materials through a sensual relationship with process. Using matter scavenged onsite and worked into custom concrete and terrazzo, this work aims to develop an empathetic relationship between material, place, and the living body, while questioning to what degree memory and affect are held by materials themselves. These sculptures, which could at once represent bodies, geological formations, or architectural ruins, play with contrasting associations of soft and hard, monumental and intimate, public and private, permanent and ephemeral, obsessive and apathetic.

 Sophia Borowska is a Montréal-based artist and researcher working in fibres, sculpture, and installation. Her work studies and subverts systems of power and control in urban environments through an expanded textile practice, applying fibres processes and theories to architectural materials. Major motivations include site specificity, the power of place, and the body's relationship to architecture and urban spaces. Borowska has exhibited work in Canadian artist-run centres, galleries, and festivals, and has presented research and been published in Canada and the United States. She holds a BFA, with great distinction, from Concordia University in Montréal, and a diploma in Textiles from Capilano University in North Vancouver, Canada. She is an affiliate researcher in the Textiles and Materiality Research Cluster under Milieux Institute for Arts, Culture, and Technology at Concordia, and a founding member of the intergenerational weaving group Collectif Toile.