FULL CIRCLE – The Art of Becoming
March 7 – March 31, 2026

Opening Reception: Saturday, March 7, 2026 | 5:30–8:30 PM
Artist Talk: Saturday, March 21, 2026 | 1:00–3:00 PM

Venue: HATCH 1121, 1121 Lucerne Ave, Lake Worth Beach, FL 33460

Media Contact: Sonya Sanchez Arias, Email: sonya5@me.com, Phone: 305-987-6411, Instagram: @Cre8tiveChild, web: www.SonyaSanchezArias.com

Sonya Sanchez Arias Presents FULL CIRCLE – The Art of Becoming, A Retrospective Exhibition at HATCH 1121 Lake Worth Beach, FL — Multidisciplinary artist Sonya Sanchez Arias presents FULL CIRCLE – The Art of Becoming, a retrospective exhibition spanning nearly four decades of work, on view at HATCH 1121 from March 7 through March 31, 2026. The exhibition opens with a public reception on Saturday, March 7, from 5:30 to 8:30PM, and includes an Artist Talk on Saturday, March 21, from 1:00 to 3:00 PM.

FULL CIRCLE – The Art of Becoming traces the evolution of Arias’s artistic practice from her earliest photographic work first exhibited in 1988 to her most recent mixed media, assemblage, and digitally layered portrait works. The exhibition unfolds both chronologically and conceptually, revealing how one body of work gives rise to the next—how vision matures, experimentation persists, and personal and cultural histories shape artistic expression over time. 

Born in Trinidad and based in South Florida, Arias’s work explores themes of ancestry, identity, migration, cultural hybridity, and transformation. Photography—first embraced as a teenager following the loss of her brother—became the foundation of a lifelong practice rooted in seeing beyond the surface. Over time, her work expanded into mixed media assemblage, alternative image transfer processes, and material experimentation using fabric, reclaimed objects, embroidery, and layered surfaces.

Even when engaging with complex social and political realities, Arias’s work consistently returns to beauty, resilience, and possibility. FULL CIRCLE reflects this philosophy—an ongoing meditation on memory, material, and the continual act of becoming.

Artist Bio

Sonya Sanchez Arias is a Trinidad-born, South Florida–based multidisciplinary artist and photographer whose work spans nearly four decades. Her practice moves fluidly between photography, mixed-media assemblage, digital collage, and sculptural experimentation, often incorporating reclaimed materials and found objects. Her work explores themes of transformation, memory, cultural hybridity, resilience, and the beauty found in imperfection.
Sanchez Arias began photographing at the age of thirteen following the loss of her brother, an experience that shaped photography into both a means of survival and a lifelong language of seeing. She later studied photography at the Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT), where her understanding of the medium expanded beyond documentation into experimentation and storytelling. Throughout her career, her work has evolved from traditional photographic practice into increasingly layered and tactile forms, reflecting a devotion to reinvention, process, and hope.

Extended Artist Statement

I believe the job of an artist is to put hope back into the world. Even when my work engages with difficult social, political, or personal realities, I strive to create something transformative—something that allows the viewer to land on beauty, memory, or possibility. Art, for me, is an act of reclamation: of meaning, of material, of self.

My creative life spans nearly four decades, beginning with photography and evolving into a multidisciplinary practice that includes mixed-media assemblage, digital collage, altered photographic surfaces, and sculptural experimentation. This evolution has never been linear. Instead, my work unfolds through cycles—each body of work emerging from the questions, losses, and discoveries of its time, then folding back into the next. The act of becoming, rather than arrival, has always been my true subject.

Photography entered my life at the age of thirteen after the death of my fourteen-year-old brother. What began as a means of survival became the language of my life. Through the camera, I learned how to slow down, to observe, to hold onto fleeting moments. That early relationship led me to study photography at the Rochester Institute of Technology, where I came to understand the medium not simply as documentation, but as a way of seeing deeply, patiently, and with intention. I have never stopped photographing—though what photography looks like in my work has continually transformed.

Over time, my practice moved beyond traditional photographic boundaries into assemblage, layering, and physical intervention. Images became objects. Objects became stories. Found materials—discarded fragments, weathered relics, everyday ephemera—entered the work as carriers of memory and metaphor. I am drawn to what has been overlooked or cast aside, not out of nostalgia, but out of reverence for resilience. I believe everything holds the potential to be reimagined, carried forward, and made meaningful again.

Themes of cultural hybridity, ancestry, identity, and coexistence run throughout my work. Born in Trinidad and shaped by Caribbean and American influences, I inhabit an in-between space—one that values multiplicity over certainty. My work often reflects this layered identity, embracing imperfection, contradiction, and complexity as sources of strength. Whether addressing environmental concerns, social fracture, or personal vulnerability, I return again and again to the belief that transformation is possible—even necessary.

In recent years, my work has come full circle, returning to photography through new lighting techniques, layered transfers, and reimagined surfaces that blur the line between image and object. This return is not a repetition, but a deepening. Everything I have gathered—experience, loss, curiosity, joy—now informs how I see and how I make. Across all mediums and bodies of work, I remain a collector of details and a believer in possibility. My practice is rooted in the conviction that beauty exists everywhere—even in what is broken, forgotten, or unfinished. Through my work, I invite viewers to consider their own process of becoming, and to recognize that transformation is not an endpoint, but an ongoing, luminous act.