Dear reader, 

Do you know the limits of your flesh? 


When did you discover its presence? Did you pick a scab too soon, found premature and tender pink beneath? Held a flashlight to your cheek? Let light flow through that false barrier? Did you feel safe in the singular subjectivity of your skin? Complete in your closed complexion? 

Calla Soderholm’s inside (myself) takes form in flesh and light. Its medium is the body and its absence. Its form is skin and screen, soldering the pure information of projected light with the pure deformation of a body in contortion. 

A cardboard box awaits you in a dim room. It is covered in gestural and fluid, broad and visceral brush strokes of bodily, fleshy tones. Dermal pinks swirl and blend with jaundiced yellows, revealing moments the colour of dried blood, seconds of fecal browns, agitations from the beiges and the blushes of a body in motion. The box curves upwards slightly, its bottom edges just missing the cold floor upon which it rests, its top a gentle concave, arching down in its middle, reaching for that which it contains. The box can’t quite appear as it is, can’t quite remain cardboard in our visual imaginary. It is transformed, not only by its washable paint flesh, but by the figure of light, the vision of electronic body, the contortions of skin in contact contained within. The box becomes screen and container as a recording of Soderholm inside the box, painting it from within, is projected onto the box. She is almost nude, wearing only a beige leotard and her sweep of short blonde hair. Her body is contorted as it paints, too large for her container, struggling to navigate the box in which she rests, contained, trapped, or creating. She holds a white plastic bucket, scooping flesh-tones of paint from it, using bare fingers and untied hair to paint the walls of the box she is within. As the hour passes, Soderholm methodically and patiently paints her flesh onto the walls, paints the walls with her flesh, paints her flesh with the walls, becomes paint and skin, dissolves membrane into medium, lets her integument and environment entangle under the visuality of viscera. The recording of her body inside the box is filmed and projected back onto the same box. She appears almost as an apparition of light, the dimensionality is confusing, indeterminate. It is hard to understand whether Soderholm’s physical self is contained in the box, behind a screen of light, or if she is a video body, a recording projected upon the box’s screen. She appears distant, caged behind a veil, yet present, corporeal, and existing in real time within her cardboard cage. Because she painted the box at the time of recording, it is covered in the aforementioned visceral paint at the time of audience experience. As the projected recording progresses before the viewers eyes, the recorded process of painting complicates the visual field, adding flesh upon painted flesh, stacking layers of washable paint, replicating the multilayered organic structure of epidermis, dermis, and hypodermis. As Soderholm’s body is also progressively covered in paint, as she blurs with the recorded and physical box screen, she becomes camouflaged into her environment. Or perhaps her environment becomes camouflaged into her body.




inside (myself), 2024. Cardboard, acrylic paint, projector, body.


Dear viewer,

asks the box, the body, the skin, and the paint:

Do you know the limits of your flesh?


The skin inhabits an inherently dialectical position. Skin is what keeps us contained, keeps us intact as an impenetrable subject. The skin makes us singular, makes us closed and secure, brings us the sense of being held together. The skin protects us from the world. The skin protects us from our internal body. Yet, at the same time, the skin is our point of contact with the world, the other, the external. To skin something is to reveal it, to expose it, to leave it vulnerable. The skin is ripe with pores, channels, openings. It is permeable and penetrable, fragile. It is as open as it is closed, as secure as it is vulnerable, as containing as it is opening. It is where we become singular, yet it is where we make contact with others, it is our point of subjectivity and our point of intersubjectivity. The skin reveals us as a person, and is also what hides the inner workings of our personhood. The skin reveals and obscures. It is absent and present. It is visible and invisible.

The screen inhabits an inherently dialectical position. The screen is where we show, where we display a film or an image, where we project and render visible. To screen is to display, to share, to exhibit. Yet, at the same time, to screen is to conceal, to separate, to hide, to disguise. We screen something to make it invisible, unseen, put away, veiled. Our window screens are translucent and revealing. Our computer screens are opaque and obscuring. Screen is a visibility and an invisibility, a reveal and a concealment, a display and a hiding. The screen reveals and obscures. It is absent and present. It is visible and invisible.


So what becomes of skin when it is transformed into screen? What becomes of screen when it is transformed into skin?


Soderholm’s skin, as inside (myself) progresses and the fleshy paint overtakes its box, dominates the screen box upon which it is projected. The screen is doubly obscured by physical paint and by the projected recording of paint atop it. It is revealed as flesh, yet obscured as camouflage. Simultaneously, as she paints her body and paints with her body, Soderholm’s skin approaches indistinguishability from the boxed screen in which it is contained and projected. It is obscured as camouflage, yet revealed as screen. One loses confidence in their designation of subject and object, loses sight of the contours of the body and the limits of box, loses flesh amidst flesh, screen amidst screen. An object-oriented affinity appears, an intersubjective operation occurs. Soderholm’s integument - that of flesh and that of box - is fused through the medium of paint. 

Much like the layers of the skin mediate our bodies, layers of artistic mediation inform inside (myself). Flesh is under paint is within box is under paint is digitally recorded is uploaded to computer is projected through light onto box under paint. The skin, the screen, and the medium of paint create a hypermediated experience of false legibility. Everything is rendered ambiguous under the cold light of a high-lumen projector. Everything is complicated in the fleshy paint of Soderholm’s art.

Soderholm’s background is in portraiture, primarily working in acrylic paint. Her first major body of work included 233 portraits of her peers from the collarbone upwards, with no indication of clothing or background, purely flesh and face. Soderholm then focused on self-portraiture, establishing more complex gestalts and engaging with larger sections of the body, composing scenes of her body in action, in environment, in clothing, and in engagement with objects and others. Still, the focus on her own embodiment, the visual emphasis on an enfleshed body, remained. Soon, her paintings began to dispose of figuration entirely. Large canvases depict ambiguous flesh, bodily assemblages that verge on the surreal, multi-canvas works that depict the complex colour, tone, and shadow aggregates that form our visceral selves. For Soderholm, the flesh is indispensable. As she moved towards a more sculptural and 3-dimensional practice, her flesh moved with her. Soderholm’s body of work now consists of phallic silicon structures, human-sized boulders of visceral visuality, hanging structures that evoke wounds, bodily fluids, and the distinct visuality of flesh. Her sculptural work still depends greatly on her painterly background. The majority of her 3-dimensional works, including inside (myself), utilize paint as perhaps the fleshiest element. It is with paint that Soderholm creates flesh, her distinct and identifiable swirls of derma, meat, and skin. It is with paint that Soderholm most implies the body, renders it visual and identifiable as body. Importantly, she does this without ever relying on techniques of figuration. There are no contour lines in Soderholm’s sculptures, no legible interiors and exteriors, no containments or vertices through which we recognize a body as a body. And yet, there is no denying the body in her work. One has no choice but to wonder: How does one depict the body without depicting a figure?

inside (myself) asks this same question. How can a body be in art without being defined as a body through techniques of division? How can you visualize a body without demarcating internal from external? How can you recognize a fleshy subject without separating figure from environment? For inside (myself), Soderholm offers two solutions. First, like much of her work, this piece uses the visuality of viscera, the representation of flesh. Her distinct and gestural style immediately evokes the body, yet it does not evoke the singular, contained body that we usually identify with skin. Instead of using skin as contour line, the medium of separating internal from external, Soderholm’s skin becomes the site of non-containment. Skin occupies entire canvases, sculptures, and in this case, screens. The skin is ubiquitous, environmental, encompassing – anything but singular or contained. Soderholm’s work recognizes the dialectical position that skin occupies, recognizes skin as a visible invisibility, as an open closing, as a subject of intersubjectivity. Flesh and screen become indistinguishable. The body is undeniably present, yet the figure, the subject, and the individual are nowhere to be found. The art historical body is forever reimagined, the subject is forever obscured, the body’s representation is revolutionized.

Further, inside (myself) explores the non-singular body through the presence and absence of Soderholm’s own body. Documentation of her actual body is projected on the landscape of the non-figurative body of flesh. And this documentation is of her actual body as it creates a non-figurative body on the screen walls of her container. The (inter)subjective is complicated here. Does a closed, physical, singular body ruin the pure flesh non-figure Soderholm has thus far so masterfully crafted? Does the presence of a subject, a figure, undermine the cleverly constructed bodiless body so rich in her work? One may argue that this site of intersubjectivity, this relation of entire flesh and absolute viscera cannot be maintained when a singular and closed body enters the gestalt. One must remember, however, that skin and screen, true body and painted body, environment and individual become difficult to distinguish in inside (myself). It is difficult, by the end of the hour, to confidently demarcate Soderholm’s body, to state that she begins and ends in any particular place. The process reflects this further. She paints with her hands and hair, she contorts her body to fit amidst the paint, her skin becomes covered in paint and the paint becomes covered in skin. She is screen and skin, singular and multiplied, closed and open, visible and invisible. The body remains open. The skin does not enclose. The integuments remain entangled. 

Thus, the most identifiable body that remains by inside (myself)’s conclusion is that of the box. While everything else has been rendered interconnected and non-singular, the box remains a vessel. The contour lines and indicators of external/internal are not found within the flesh of the paint nor of the artist. Instead, the box becomes the demarcator of internal and external. This is perhaps the only unsolved problem of inside (myself). Non-containment, ubiquitous skin, and the absence of identifiable figuration fall into tension with the pure containment of the box the artist painted from within. The box becomes the body, becomes the subject, becomes the singular entity that separates in from out, self from world, flesh from environment. This is not an easy problem to solve, particularly not in visual art, where some limit is inherent to every medium. One cannot make the whole world a canvas, one cannot create absolute openness in media that produce singularities. Perhaps this critic just longs for an unending world of intersubjective, open, visceral, visibly invisible Soderholmian flesh. Perhaps this critic just yearns to fuse with the skin and the screen they are so affected by, mourning their inability to enter the body of work by critiquing its inherent containment.

Ultimately, inside (myself)’s title speaks to its entire condition. To be inside oneself is to become subject and object, individual and environment, to see what is otherwise unseen and yet to give up being seen by the external world. To be inside oneself is to lose sight of the places where one begins and ends, to fuse into a fleshy landscape of pure body. And yet, to be inside oneself is to be contained, to be trapped, to be singular and internal. Perhaps this tension is, in fact, not a problem to be overcome in art, but rather a problem to be revealed in art. Perhaps Soderholm does not seek the pure boundariless body, but opportunes viewers to wonder how they contain, are containing, and are contained. Perhaps seeing Soderholm inside herself gives us time to question what the inside and the self each mean.