Deb Sokolow’s fifth show with Western Exhibitions, Visualizing, opens with a free public reception at our Chicago location on Friday, November 3, from 5 to 8pm. Gallery hours are Tuesday to Saturday, 11am to 6pm. Sokolow is an artist and writer whose semi-fictitious drawings and books speculate both comically and critically on a number of subjects including architecture, politics, organizational structures and the human psyche. Concurrent with this show, Sokolow’s work will also be on view in the 5th iteration of the Chicago Architecture Biennial, opening to the public at the Chicago Cultural Center on November 2, and in the group show Sightings at the Sun Valley Museum of Art in Idaho, through December 2.

Deb Sokolow’s most recent text-driven, maquette-like drawings visualize ideas in which architecture, design, psychology and social engineering overlap. She envisions scenarios from both an idiosyncratically-designed future and present moment in response to the male-dominated history of architecture described in architecture historian Kenneth Frampton’s 1300-page tome, Modern Architecture, to neurologist Sigmund Freud’s ideas about unconscious desire and to theorist Edward Bernays’ (Freud’s nephew) focus on controlling human behavior for corporate interests.

Also influential to this body of work are the descriptions of wellness cults and cultures in linguist Amanda Montell’s book, Cultish: The Language of Fanaticism, as well as the psychological suppression and mycelia-infested mansion described in author Silvia Moreno-Garcia’s novel, Mexican Gothic. Sokolow’s drawings respond, through a feminist lens, to these sources and focus with humor and criticality on both the spiritual and mental health needs of individuals as well as the potential for social engineering to control built environments (for better or for worse) in an era of increasing climate, economic and social instability.

Sokolow uses narrative, in the form of hand-drafted text in each drawing, to give content and context to the drawing’s visuals which are semi-abstract and often suggest aerial and elevation views of floorplans, the shapes of objects and other diagrammatic elements. Perpendicular dimensional paper tabs protrude from the surface of each drawing’s surface, suggesting walls and other types of boundaries. Some pairings of texts and visuals intentionally don’t quite match up, or they purposefully match up too well in an over-redundant and ridiculous way. Often, something is revealed in the visuals that is not mentioned in the text, and vice versa.

In Gallery 1, Sokolow presents ten large drawings, building on her recent work with the themes discussed above. On display in Gallery 2 are Sokolow’s “thinking drawings,” smaller, palimpsest-like works where ideas and informal, diagrammatic visuals are brainstormed and occasionally crossed-out after being drafted onto the page. These drawings function as a behind-the-scenes, bonus track which can be used as a key to a more in-depth viewing of the formal works presented in Gallery 1. Sokolow cites the 2022 show, Bridget Riley Drawings: From the Artist’s Studio, at the Art Institute of Chicago and The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s 2016 exhibition, Unfinished, as influences.

Deb Sokolow’s (b.1974 Davis, CA) work has been included in the 4th Athens Biennale and in exhibitions at Museum für Gegenwartskunst (Siegen, Germany), Van Abbemuseum (Eindhoven, Netherlands), The Drawing Center (New York), Institute of Contemporary Art (Philadelphia), and Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art (Hartford). Sokolow’s drawings have been reproduced for BOMB Magazine, Best American Comics and in Phaidon’s Vitamin D2. Collections include the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, D.C., the Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art, and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago. She received an MFA from the School of the Art Institute in Chicago and a BFA from the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. Sokolow, based in Chicago, is a recipient of an Artadia award, two Illinois Arts Council Agency visual arts fellowships and is on faculty in the department of Art Theory and Practice at Northwestern University.

Image info: Deb Sokolow: Thinking Drawing #1 , 2023. Graphite, crayon, colored pencil, pastel, ink, and collage on Montval paper. 12h x 16w x 1d in.

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