Bird
In Bird, Soi activates a filter through which his personal travels and memories are strained, resulting in what he refers to as a vista—a complex, filigreed window constructed by the overlaps of personal experience. The narrative is thus constructed through the assemblage and intersection of these landscapes in one frame.
The pattern glimpsed by Soi on a mashrabiya in Srinagar is reduced to building blocks and reconstituted into this avian motif. Its wings are rendered in abstractions: the left wing is a motif related to the facade of the Twin Towers (Soi was a student in the US when the events of 9/11 occurred). The right wing is filled in with a pattern constructed by Soi using maple leaves collected outside his Amsterdam studio. Maple leaves are referred to as chinar leaves and are evocative of Kashmir, where Soi has been immersing himself in the valley city of Srinagar since 2014. A study of the bark of an oak tree near his Amsterdam studio constitutes the head, body, and tail of the Bird motif, rendered in silverpoint.
