A Sense of Sonder - Helen Sandoval

The Grey Art Museum was filled with various artworks created by artists, but most importantly, women. Women that usually don't have their voices heard in such an industry were highlighted in the AWAW exhibit. While I found most of the pieces beautiful, the one that caught my eye the most was 'For to (X)', 2017. This piece was made by Valeska Soares who used existing book pages and created them into a collage. Soares's use of found objects and utilizing them for her art reminds me of Saar and Cornell's work. Nonetheless, what first caught my eye about the piece was the composition of the pages and how it was created to look like a vast of space. This made more sense to me when reading the label of the piece that explained that Soares was trained as an architect. As such, I believe that the composition wasn't random but carefully crafted. I understood this 'vast' amount of pages as the understanding that there are a 'vast' amount of lives that we don't know but can understand. The book pages contained a series of dedications from authors to loved ones and readers, hence the title 'For to (X)'. From my understanding, I viewed this piece as a reflection of the word 'sonder'. Sonder is defined by the dictionary as "realizing that every other individual one sees has a life as full and real as one's own." All the dedications to individuals that I didn't know but made such a big impact on someone else's life, truly shows that life goes beyond yourself. Soares shares the same feeling, stating that these pages were from antique books she found and that they "stored memories" and "material history".