Katherine Hua – Looking Outwards – 10

Sophia Kahn is an Australian new media artist currently living in Brooklyn, New York. She earned her BA in Fine Arts and History Goldsmith College, University of London; a Graduate Certificate in Spatial Information Architecture from RMIT University, Melbourne; and an MFA in Art and Technology Studies at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

She creates illustrations and videos but the main focus of her work is creating sculptures through 3D printing.She uses a precisely engineered 3D last scanner to design the body of her sculpture. When scanning, the human body is constantly moving, so the scanner receives conflicting spatial coordinates, thereby creating a glitch. This glitch is what gives her sculptures the fragmented, deconstructed appearance. She takes this scan of damaged data and re-envisions it onto a different a canvas: prints, video, hand-painted, or 3D printed sculptures.

I admire her work because her 3D printed sculptures reflects ideas of deconstruction as she blurs the lines between old and new media, digital and physical realms, and interior and exterior spaces. Her work seems to dive into the haunting challenges of time, history, and identity. They seem to resonate the idea that death is inevitable as her pieces are fragmented, giving reminders of decay and aging.