“Lightness of Being” is made through a laborious process that draws attention to the difference between "looking" and "seeing." This new body of work involves outdoor shooting, printing, marking with translucent acrylic, varnish, ink, or oil, and then reshooting at a long exposure. With an 8x10 camera in the field, Soren orchestrates existing light sources: car headlights, flare stacks near oil pumps, glowing windows in suburban neighborhoods, and reflections in mirrors, puddles, and ocean waves.

These works spotlight the glitches in human perception that make it difficult to see the world clearly. When something impairs our vision — like a blindingly bright light or strong emotions accompanied by tears — our brain conjures phenomena that aren’t there. It fills in the gaps.

During the second shoot, Soren uses long exposures and improvised light sources — flashlights, headlamps, colored gels, and studio strobes — to explore the limits of the medium.

Through this multimedia approach, the artist investigates the difference between human perception and objective reality using the irreducible essence of photography — light.

Soren’s photographs are always more than a tool for representation. They serve as a means of distillation, capturing not just the picture she takes with her camera but the filters through which we all see. In life, we never see just one moment. Our memory and experiences influence every visual that hits our eyes. After so many years as a reporter witnessing the who, what, when, where, and why, Soren’s art practice strives for a new kind of seeing. Soren now is able to include all the nuance of the spaces in between true and false for a kind of perception that is at the outskirts of human reach. In this way, Soren’s art visualizes the social and psychic restlessness of our age.