installation day

On site in the Hoffmaster Gallery at Lawrence University installing nexus. The exhibition runs March 29 - May 5, 2013 with an artist talk on April 9th.

Great weekend for SPE

The 50th National Conference for the Society of Photographic Education was this past weekend in Chicago IL.  It was a sold out conference with a stellar keynote speaker line up.

I was honored to be selected to give an image maker presentation at this years conference. Saturday morning at 11am I gave a talk to a room full of peers, students and mentors. Thanks to everyone who attended the talk.  I'll be in New Mexico at UNM Albuquerque talking next week March 18, and in Appleton WI April 9.  

This spring is full of words and new faces. 

photo Jon Horvath

proscenium on view in Kohler, WI

IN FRONT OF THE LENS at ARTspace Kohler
Now through March 30

Thanks to Beth Shank for the install shots! 

Midwest Photographers Project

Pleased to announce that my series proscenium is included in rotating collection of the Midwest Photographers Project at the Museum of Contemporary Photography.

a year ago today...

nexus featured in UNLESS YOU WILL

Pleased to be a part of this beautiful issue of UNLESS YOU WILL, by Heidi Romano

ISSUE 24

“Walk with the dreamers, the believers, the courageous, the cheerful, the planners, the doers, the successful people with their heads in the clouds and their feet on the ground. Let their spirit ignite a fire within you to leave this world better than when you found it...” Wilferd Peterson

Goggling Landscape photography I found lots of award winning photographers on the first page, whose work is about sunsets, beaches, or big bridges. Not sure what it is about them, but they look fake - too polished, too neat, too perfect. They do not inspire, nor do webinars, advanced how to’s, tips and tricks, or element theories … if I watch 27 episodes, will I be a great photographer? Hmmm no. Get out, try, play, fail, practice and then some more.
While some dream destinations might look that pristine, I prefer landscapes of the real kind. Landscapes that inspire my imagination, that make me want to put on my shoes and go for a long walk. To discover, see, and find.

I am intrigued by both the complex and solitary aspects of a place, by images that tell a story, real or imagined. A suspended adventure, no arranged elements where everything is like looking out a window. I am in pursuit of a magic that is like a romantic, spontaneous Sunday morning idea. Land that is overgrown, a sea of blue, or a story that presents us with various periods of time.

Marvelous landscape images do not show us exactly what the photographer saw. While the location is essential, it is the interpretation of it that they reveal. The artists observation marks a passage of time of their experience. Their present moment emphasizes the layered consciousness of a traveler.

A photographers images reveal their relationship to landscape. They capture a happening, an impression, a personal history and not necessarily what was in front of them, but how immersed they were, how they perceived, imagined, or felt the landscape in their hearts.

This issue is about those dreamy interpretations that one often can not describe necessarily - of relationships with nature – an emotional response to light, spaces to dream, ideas of getting away. To gaze at a reality of beautiful landscapes and reasons to continue searching.

Jungjin Lee
Sonja Thomsen
Lauren Henkin
Amelia Bauer
Andres Gonzalez
Jessica M. Kaufman
Renata Buziak
Ingvar Kenne
Max Juhasz
Tito Mouraz

Reviewed in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

Review: Sonja Thomsen at Inova

By Mary Louise Schumacher of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

Nov. 23, 2012

I’ve seen it on so many antique shop shelves but never given a second thought to what we call it: milk glass.

On the one hand, the name given to these vases and little jars conjures the idea of essential, nourishing liquid. That perishable stuff that contains everything a new life needs; the endowment of mothers.

On the other hand, glass is a resilient and fixed material; something brittle, fragile and clear.
Then, when I consider what gives milk glass its particular opaqueness — the ash of bones — I begin to understand why it might attract an artist like Sonja Thomsen, whose work is up at Inova, 2155 N. Prospect Ave., as part of the Nohl Exhibition.

One of the most striking components of her installation is a grouping that features a series of photographs of tactile, bumpy milk glass objects that seem to sink into and become indistinguishable from their milky white ground and space itself.

Pasted flush against the wall, laid flat, is a tiny swollen pitcher with rows of little nodules and a candy dish shaped like a basket. Foreground and background commingle, as does what’s formed and flat, solid and not. We are invited to meditate on the conjuring nature of both photography and memory.
Each object isolated in a single photograph, these pretty domestic ornaments are like spirits of real things. Or perhaps of real bodies. By softening and subsuming these hard, inanimate objects, Thomsen enlivens them and gives them an almost fleshy presence. I am mindful of burned bone and the idea that women are vessels, too. I am mindful of the ways bodies are connected across generations.

Hanging in the space in front of these images like a witness is a photograph of a female form. It is a photograph of a woman with the surface of the photographic paper gently torn away from every part of the picture save the gown. Disembodied and white, with folds of fabric gently implying the body beneath, the image recalls classical sculpture and a certain timelessness.
But it’s familiar and universal enough to bring a mother, a sister or a friend to mind, too. The cotton nightgown, seen from the back and doused in sunlight and shadow, seems very everyday, very much of our moment.

Light penetrates the thin layer of photographic paper that remains and enshrouds this form -- which exudes absence -- in an ethereal light.

All of this is only a fraction of Thomsen’s installation at Inova, on view through Dec. 9, which represents new directions for a diligently experimenting artist.

In general, the work in the Inova show does not feel as resolved as "Lacuna," a remarkably strong, earlier series, but it also is in a state of becoming and feels more specific. It's a more singular line of inquiry to do with the body, women and time.

I find it fascinating that Thomsen, after years of exploring the elemental and complex nature of water in deep inky blue, reflective, abstract and liquid landscapes, is creating a fundamentally more physical, impenetrable, beautiful world of milky white today.

Watch "burning water" the "In The Making" video exploration of Thomsen's practice made with Jason Nanna. The video series showcased the work of local artists, who worked in collaboration with local filmmakers to produce short pieces for Art City. The exhibit is on view through Dec. 9. Installation views courtesy the artist.

just opened...

I am pleased to have both petroleum and burning water in this invitational group show curated by Peggy Shaw.

Shift: Contemporary Photography Exhibition

November 12- February 2, 2013

featuring works by Bruce Checefsky, Dana Fritz, Richard Gray, Christa Kreeger Bowden, Joyce Lopez, Michael Sherwin, S. Gayle Stevens, Sonja Thomsen.

Parkland Art Gallery, 2400 West Bradley Ave, Champaign IL 61821

petroleum (panel 12) 2009, 19.5" x 18" metallic c-print mounted on di-bond, edition of 7

artist talk this WEEK...

Thursday, November 1, 2012 at 6 pm
SONJA THOMSEN ARTIST TALK: SHIFTING THE FRAME
INOVA, 2155 N. Prospect Ave., Milwaukee WI

Sonja Thomsen is enthralled by the materiality of the photograph and its relationship to form and narrative. She employs myriad strategies to shift the frame by creating installations and objects and using the spaces between photographs to tell a larger story. She will talk about her installation-based works, her use of series to carry content, and her recent foray into sculpture.

trace of possibility... paneling timelapse

Filter festival in Chicago

Filter Photo Festival is off and running. I look forward to heading down to Chicago this week to catch up with friends and meet new faces.  The timing this year couldn't be better with the Ctrl+P lacuna exhibition at Catherine Edelman Gallery. The lacuna installation is looking great and has new stacks up for it last two weeks of its run.  If you're heading to Filter be sure to stop into CEG and take a part of the piece with you.

I am pleased to have lacuna featured in the Filter Festival program.

Great opening

INOVA friday night October 5, 2012

The Greater Milwaukee Foundation's Mary Nohl Fellowship for Individual Artist's concluded its 2011 cycle with its grand group exhibition at INOVA in Milwaukee WI.  It was a fantastic night. Milwaukee showed up in droves.  I'm debuting four new works in this exhibition, vessel, trace of possibility, witness and nexus. Each of the new projects benefit from INOVA's elegant space and the paths viewers make between them. I will be posting short videos of the install during the show's run (through December 9, 2012) ... stay tuned.

trace of possibility, photo credit PJ Moody

trace of possibility, photo credit PJ Moody

trace of possibility, photo credit PJ Moody

view from inside trace of possibility, photo credit PJ Moody

trace of possibility, photo credit PJ Moody

Nexus, photo credit PJ Moody

Nexus, photo credit PJ Moody

Vessel, photo credit PJ Moody

Vessel, photo credit Art Elkon

end of day one of install at INOVA

Claire Smith is the best.

still from installation video of day one

opening next week...

THE 2011 GREATER MILWAUKEE FOUNDATION MARY L. NOHL FELLOWSHIPS EXHIBITION, OCTOBER 5 – DECEMBER 9, 2012, Peck School of the Arts, 2400 E. Kenwood Blvd., Milwaukee, WI 53211

Established artists Nicolas Lampert, Brad Lichtenstein, and Sonja Thomsen and emerging artists Richard Galling, Hans Gindlesberger, Sarah Luther, and the American Fantasy Classics group (Brittany Ellenz, Liza Pflughoft, Alec Regan, Oliver Sweet) report in a year after being selected as 2011 Nohl Fellows as part of the Greater Milwaukee Foundation’s Mary L. Nohl Fellowships for Individual Artists. The exhibition presents a range of new work in painting, photography, film, printmaking, and installation. This presentation will mark the ninth annual exhibition of fellowship winners at Inova and will be accompanied with a catalogue. The Greater Milwaukee Foundation Mary L. Nohl Fellowships for Individual Artists program is administered by the Bradley Family Foundation. The exhibition is guest curated for Inova by Nicholas Frank.

From Press Release...

SONJA THOMSEN “This has been an explosive and pivotal year of new endeavors,” declares Sonja Thomsen. She travelled to Iceland for her first international museum show; produced her first collaborative public art project in Milwaukee; participated in the birth of a collective; and relaunched her website to more accurately reflect the recent direction of her work. The fellowship award enabled her to hire studio assistants and expand into a second workspace, making it possible to investigate larger-scaled projects and three-dimensional works. Thomsen brings several of these new experiments into the gallery for the Nohl exhibition. Her first foray into sculpture, trace of possibility, is a steel and polycarbonate structure covered in silvery, reflective vinyl that stands 14 feet tall. It is placed in relation to witness, a large photograph on vinyl, and can be entered, like a mirrored cave, or circumambulated. Two new works, nexus, a changing series of archival pigment prints resting on an 8-foot wooden shelf, and vessel, nine small white-on-white still lifes on vinyl displayed with a larger, figurative image, some of its emulsion peeled away, attest to Thomsen’s belief in “the power of the sequence to carry content” and her related interest in installation. Britt Salvesen, writing in the catalogue, identifies trace of possibility as the pivotal work in Thomsen’s exhibition, functioning “metaphorically as a translation of the expansive landscapes she shot in Iceland, and as an imagined interior of the vessels she shot in the studio.” Salvesen notes that for Thomsen, “temporality is an artistic medium and a conceptual space….While time is the declared motif, even obsession, of many contemporary photographers, it is rare that an artist can get at its paradoxical nature, as if setting the clock to wind in both directions, or conjuring an hourglass to trickle sand upward and downward. Sonja Thomsen, in her exploratory, empathetic work, manages something like this.” Sonja Thomsen was born in Chicago in 1978. She received a BA from Kenyon College in 2000 and an MFA from the San Francisco Art Institute in 2004. Exhibitions include the Reykjavik Museum of Photography, Iceland; Catherine Edelman Gallery, Chicago; the New Mexico Art Museum, Santa Fe; Silverstein Photography, New York; the Madison Museum of Contemporary Art; Cynthia Reeves Gallery, New York; David Weinberg Gallery, Chicago; Silver Eye Center for Photography, Pittsburgh; and the Haggerty Museum of Art, Milwaukee.

More about all of the artists in the show here. 

image emerges

Yesterday at EXPO Chicago I sat for a tintype portrait with Keliy Anderson-Staley. It was an incredible inclusive process and Keliy is a master at her craft.  She was kind enough to let me film the reveal of the tintype as she placed it in the fixer. The contemporary alchemist.

CEG and EXPO Chicago...

I'm pleased to be featured on Catherine Edelman's Cyclops blog this week.  Heading to EXPO Chicago this weekend? Saturday night is a special late night (5-8pm) in the River North Art District. Take the shuttle from EXPO CHGO to CEG and come experience lacuna!  

oh what a night...

with over 600 reproductions removed from the install, a slew of enthusiastic conversations and grand reunions... I would say the opening last night at Catherine Edelman Gallery was a great success. 

Catherine and I

Beth and Juli

Barbara Crane talked with me for a while, she's so great!

Veronica

Joy and Kelli

half of the stacks were depleted by the end of the night...

systems framework

swimming in the logistics for the new sculpture...  thank goodness claire is here to keep it all organized!

week 2 of fabrication...

can you tell I'm excited?!

claire smith - fabrication guru

 

week one of fabrication...

Orjan inspects layout

Claire Smith, the method to this madness... fabricator extraordinaire

end of day Thursday

end of day Friday