Featured CPAC Member: Sophia Poppy Ericksen

SOPHIA POPPY ERICKSEN

Member Since: 2018

Being a member of CPAC comes with a wide-range of opportunities and benefits to further your photographic practice, including the chance to share an in-progress project or finished body of work as one of our quarterly Featured Members. We support our members’ commitment to constantly moving their art forward, which we recognize involves a vulnerability in sharing their personal vision. This dedicated effort and willingness to present intimate details of the self are seen in creations by member Sophia Poppy Ericksen. Learn more about Sophia’s unique process of layering and reassembly below.

ABOUT THE WORK

By Sophia Poppy Ericksen

Sophia’s creative process involves deconstructing elements to their core components, and reassembling them in a layered structure that conveys the depth of the ideas being expressed. This approach allows viewers to engage with multiple perspectives and angles, resulting in a rich tapestry of complex meaning that invites further exploration and reflection.

Sophia works with mixed media, collage and assemblage using found and personal ephemera, with inks and various experimental processes in and out of the darkroom.

Sophia’s most recent digital art series, Glitch in the System is a series of photographs portraying the psychological dissonance of pre-transition intimacy. The series was created with a digital alternative process, without photo editing software, using found video that has been scanned on a flatbed scanner timed to create the “glitch” effect, with subjects being altered based on the amount of time of movement versus stillness.

ABOUT THE ARTIST

Sophia Poppy Ericksen is a transgender artist who lives and works in Denver, Colorado. Delving into the intricate spaces that lie between different states of being, transitions and metamorphoses, she explores the concepts of liminality and hauntology. 

Her artwork incorporates man-made structures and fragments, remnants of stories once known but now lost, interwoven into a contemporary narrative. By engaging with hauntological themes such as presence and absence, she seeks to explore the complexities of grief as the embodiment of an absence, and the nature of time as a singular, fleeting moment in the present, with the past and future existing only as memories or concepts.

Her work traverses themes of gender identity, intimacy, childhood trauma, masculinity/femininity, war and violence.