Sophia Bakos is a fibre artist, painter, and fifth year student of Studio Arts at Montreal’s Concordia University. She made her artistic debut in Vancouver with the James Black Gallery’s exhibition of Quickie (2018), and has since exhibited with the Womenswork.art Gallery in Poughkeepsie. Recently Bakos has begun working with Lipont Gallery, B.C. and participated in the 2021 Parker Art Salon.
索菲亚·巴科斯
索菲亚·巴科斯是一名纤维艺术家、画家和蒙特利尔康考迪亚大学艺术工作室的毕业生。 她在温哥华的詹姆斯布莱克画廊的 Quickie 展览（2018 年）中首次亮相，此后又在波基普西的 Womenswork.art 画廊展出。 最近，巴科斯开始与温哥华力邦美术馆合作。并参加了2021年派克艺术沙龙。
Sophia Bakos – Artist Statement
Skin of Her Teeth was born out of my attraction to the textures, colours, patterns, and playthings of my early youth. In hoards I acquired baby clothes, baby blankets, and Hello Kitty merchandise. My thrift store spoils were transformed into a prototypical doll, roughly hand stitched and reminiscent of the rag dolls I cherished as a girl. One became many, each marred by suggestion of sexual utility. My desire to contrast girlhood and sex was innate — the two seemed inseparable as my adolescent experience left me sexually scathed and ashamed of my body.
Attention from older men felt novel at fourteen. I was beginning to resemble a woman, though I was still unmistakably a child. A twenty-five-year-old man kissed me with tongue as a thank you for purchasing his bands’ merchandise — I felt special. A girl in my grade had sex with a man in his mid twenties at a frat party. Lucky her, I thought. These incidences were common for my peers and I — they ranged from uncomfortable remarks from strange men, to full on sexual assault. At twenty-four, I am now only beginning to unpack the havoc these events have wreaked on my relationship with sex. I was moulded and weathered by adults who found my youth erotic, and it is only now that I feel empowered to claim my sexual identity back.
This reclamation manifested in the Skin of her Teeth Project. Each doll is a visualization of my adolescent self girlish and unsullied, with each assault and catcall placing gags and chains atop my school clothes. The stark dissonance between child and sex present in each doll, marks the horrible absurdity of posturing teenage girls as objects of forbidden lust. To do so, is to adorn a baby with bondage gear. Through this grotesque juxtaposition, I hope to the convert others to the unfortunately radical belief that teenage girls are not sexy — that they are children, who deserve to write their own sexual narrative when they’re old enough to do so.
In a world where the sexy schoolgirl trope reigns, and men foam at the mouth for the eighteenth birthdays of their favourite sex symbols, I fear for girls. I fear for my future daughter, and for every woman I encounter, as we all have, (or may have one day) our own horror stories to tell.