Where do the human body and the physical world intersect, and how does that meeting impact our knowledge of the world and ourselves? In her exploration of these fundamental questions, photographer Sonja Thomsen reads Margaret Fuller and her grand-nephew Buckminster Fuller, gives pride of place to Lucia Moholy, and experiments with prisms of her own design, through sculpture building and picture taking. Her images sometimes involve her and her loved onesâ bodies, though far more gently than did Isaac Newton, whom she notes once attempted to stick a knife into the back of his eye in order to create the image of a rainbow. The result of all this research is You Will Find It Where It Is: A Reader, an artist book publishedâfinally, after various COVID-related printing and release delaysâin an edition of 300 by Poor Farm Press, the imprint of artist-curator-gallerist Michelle Grabner. Spiral bound and filled with half pages, vellums and unusual papers, Thomsenâs book is itself an instance of the thing with which it is concerned: direct human experience of the world. No two people will handle it in exactly the same way.
âLori Waxman 2020-08-09 9:11 AM
062 is pleased to present by her own movement, thomsenâs second iterative exhibition that originates within her book. By her own movement is an evolving installation of photographs, light modulators, and architectural interventions at the gallery by artist sonja thomsen, whose installations present wonder as a radical way to imagine post-patriarchal futures. thomsenâs current fixation with 18th-century mathematician Maria Agnesiâs curve mistranslated into the âWitch of Agnesiâ is the wellspring of her intervention at the gallery. This mathematical form is both oculus and womb breeding the dynamic installation. The title of the exhibition borrows from Hélène Cixousâ 1975 essay Laugh of the Medusa where âwoman must put herself into the text- as into the world and into history- by her own movement.â  As an exercise in embracing entanglements, thomsen welcomed the invitation to experiment within the gallery, conjuring connections between the Witch of Agnesi and the Laugh of Medusa as a place of origin.
As part of sonja thomsenâs installation at 062 “by her own movement”, thomsen will be in conversation with fellow Chicago artist Jen Delos Reyes. The two will discuss the idea of âwriting oneselfâ into being and what it means to create a life and practice that intersects with cultures of care, experimentation, world-building, writing, embodied learning, and collaboration. Both artists will also share from their most recent publications thomsenâs You Will Find it Where it is: A Reader, released in 2020 by Poor Farm Press and Delos Reyesâs forthcoming anthology, Defiantly Optimistic: Turning Up in a World on Fire, Collected Writings 2007-2022.
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