Sophie Victoria

There’s a thread of unease that runs through Sophie Victoria’s work. A Canadian interdisciplinary artist living and working in Central Alberta (Treaty 7 Territory), she feels most creatively alive in environments where other artists are gathered.

In archival quality (expired) ii, a series of eight photographic collages, Victoria documents the slow decomposition of an abandoned farmhouse built in the 1940s and left to rot until its demolition in 2023. Torn fragments of family photographs obscure the images, interrupting the record of a house at the end of its life. A bright blue armchair repurposed by nesting rodents. Nursery wallpaper peeling beneath frost and mold. These details—both intimate and unsettling—draw parallels between the architecture of a home and the architecture of the body, each one collecting memory, injury, and time.

Captured in the spring of 2021, each photograph depicts a different part of the house, partially obscured by fragments ripped from family photos belonging to the final generation who lived there. Each collage offers a restricted view of what its past may have looked like, contrasted against its deteriorated end-of-life state.

“The memories of the house are retained in its structural materials much like flesh retains scars,” she writes. The series becomes a study in erosion and endurance—two points in time intersecting through one shared place, each collage an exposition of the natural, unyielding, and ever-present process of decay.

Drawing from the visual language of Gothic and Southern Gothic literature, Victoria’s art moves fluidly across mediums. Titles appear in lowercase, unpunctuated—small gestures toward impermanence. “All of my work is intentionally titled in lowercase,” she says. “Life is lowercase. No marked beginning or end—just one point somewhere in the timeline.”

Her process values labour and discomfort—the physical act of making as both endurance and empathy. “It’s important to experience the full range of emotions, especially the uncomfortable ones,” she reflects. “Sitting with discomfort allows for greater depth in how the artwork communicates.”

When she feels disconnected, she goes into the past. She looks at the fundamental pieces of herself that remain—the ones unchanged by time, experience, or relationship. Control, she believes, is a human illusion. “We truly have such a limited scope,” she says. “At least artists have the capacity to communicate in unique ways—to translate complex and abstract thoughts and feelings into tangible forms.”

Victoria invites her viewers to do the same: to meet the work where they are, to see themselves inside it. “The way a person interacts with any piece of art is informed by their own background, emotions, relationships, and experiences,” she says. “I want people to meet my art where they’re at.”