This exhibition is made possible by the support of Hahnemühle Fine Art. The exhibition prints were made during a residency at LATITUDE in Chicago.
INTR
OD
UCT
ION
Glowing Wavelengths in Between is, in the artist’s words, “a rumination on the very physicality of seeing.” Sonja Thom-sen’s photographs and installations create a tangible means to experience the ephemeral qualities of light, recalibrating our perceptions of the visible world. Her photographic and installation work springs from extensive studio-based ex-perimentation with optical phenomena and from research on philosophical debates about the fluidity of objective scientific knowledge. Thomsen finds inspiration in an array of sourc-es from the optical experiments of Sir Isaac Newton to the musings of inventor Buckminster Fuller and the manifestos of artist and designer László Moholy-Nagy. Utilizing an array of materials that refract and reflect light, her artistic practice embraces improvisation and iteration as means to creative discovery. The resulting pieces—vibrant color photographs, intricate collages, immersive murals, faceted metallic sculp-tures—fluidly shift between direct documentation and desta-bilizing abstraction. Thomsen’s layered works transform the exhibition space through delicate gestures that elicit wonder at the most quotidian elements of light, space and time.
- Gregory J. Harris, Assistant Curator, DPAM
Depth of Fieldby Nicholas Frank
Legend has it that Buckminster Fuller could feel the rotation of the planet, in his foot, when standing on a promontory near his home in Bear Island, Maine—at once perceiving the edge of the known world, and staring out into space, grasping. This imaginative sensitivity, perhaps suspect, is surely what led him to imagine Earth as a vessel, a spaceship, careening through the universe. If the flat-earthers wanted a simple world, Fuller willed it into dizzying extradimensionality. His vision of us on a boat together in endless space reduces us, and simultaneously places us within scales beyond perception.
Is it possible to take a picture of that sensation? Many techno-logical means give us glimpses beyond what our visual cortices can perceive. A camera trained on the night sky, for example, contradictorily captures the motion of the earth by making it appear that the stars are the things moving, time-lapsed lines rather than the shining pinpoints of light as they appear to the naked eye. In such a picture, without necessarily being aware of it, we see the materiality of photography: how time and space and position and movement and life and death and the universe get translated through the medium of images.
ESSAY
Sonja Thomsen humbly claims not much more than a dilet-tante’s interest in science, in math, cosmology, and phenome-nology. But all these subjects are in play for a true student of photography, for one who sees light and physics coalesce into a form that influences perception, measurement, and mem-ory. The idea of a ‘frozen moment,’ so important to the opera-tion of a photograph, transmits one instant into a succession of forthcoming moments. Freezing is starkly different from the fluid act of photographing, which is a play of recognition, hope, luck, and an awareness of the mechanics the present operation will produce—catching the rainbow, or the sundog, or the assassination, in a play of light, time, distance, focus, surface, reflection, refraction, and distortion.
Almost nothing is unphotographable. Even mysterious brain processes can be imaged, and a single atom can be gazed at. None of this visualization would be possible without con-text, the wider perspective that gives focus to the specific. Wondering about photography as a process and an effect, Thomsen has arrived at a view beyond the viewfinder, where a mere play of light comments on how her family interacts intergenerationally. Like peering at a distant object through a radio telescope, a photograph can allow entry to a moment we have no direct access to, which we can then connect to our own personal present—seeing one’s son’s eyes reflected in an image of the great grandmother you never met.
Thomsen’s particular perversity in physically peeling the human subject out of a photograph, via the emulsion, reveals image as object, as a fallible, staged thing, representative of life but not of the living moment it tries and fails to capture. Her act is not unlike glomming flesh through an electron microscope, which anyone could easily mistake for a foreign planet. Only a sophisticated operation of light, material, reflec-tion, refraction, translation, and distortion even allows such a preternatural glimpse. Can a person be recognized from their fingerprint? Or just a place they’ve been?
Looking back through the lens, a photograph is firstly proof that the photographer was there. Next, it also proves each element of its makeup. Thomsen’s recent focus on a Fuller-es-que construction, Trace of Possibility (2013), is one in a series of efforts to materialize the constituents of photography as things in and of themselves: to catch and construct the play of light on a surface as on a child’s hand in Demarcate (2013); to open up that light into its separately colored beams in Prismatic Compass (2013); to examine the physics of the lens (both kinds) in Tangents (2013); and to dig into the substrates of perception at the level of raw sensation in Trace of Trace and Power of Ten (both 2013). Thomsen uses exhibitions to bring these works together in an extended meditation on the sub-stance of the image, an operation almost Lucretian in its scope (wherein objects throw off ‘skins’ that travel through the ether
to the surface of our eyes, so that we can perceive them visual-ly). To gain the necessary distance of an examiner and analyzer, Thomsen steps back even further from behind the camera to a different sort of objective place, where her family lives, with its pressing demands in the immediate but also in the patterns that it places on her, in the patterns she replaces, and in the grander pattern that will replace her eventually. It’s as though she can feel the planet turning underneath her feet, the abstraction of time working its barely perceptible effect, while the brain does its best to freeze each memorable moment in a fixity that is as false as it is true. The only photographic truth is everything that happened around the frame of the photograph, only there and only then. All else is memory.
-Nicholas Frank is an artist and educator based in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.
Sonja Thomsen in conversation with Gregory J. HarrisDePaul Art Museum, Chicago, IL April 13, 2015
Gregory J. Harris: Glowing Wavelengths in Between is, in many ways, about light and exploring the material possibilities of light. To do this you work across media with photographs, collage, and sculptures, but a single piece, a sculpture, forms the backbone of the project. How did this project begin?
Sonja Thomsen: The most important thing to know about making this body of work is that it’s a process of discovery. I’ve made a lot of the work in response to the large sculpture in the show, Trace of Possibility. The idea for it came out of a residency I had in Iceland a few years ago. It was the first time where I had a vision of a thing—it was actually an architectural space, this crystalline cave—in a dream that I felt I needed to recreate. I took a leap and made the piece and have been in the process of working backward to try to understand it as an artistic gesture as well as its relationship to photography, light, perspective, and distortion. By making the sculpture, it became really apparent to me that so much of my photographic work up to that point had been about the perception of light and how light behaved on a two-dimen-sional surface. Ultimately, I’d been exploring what can happen when you’re physically in the experience of light.
INTERVIEW
GH: This body of work is called Glowing Wavelengths in Between. Where does the title come from?
ST: The title came from an experiment I created to see what happens when you try to explain or describe a rainbow. I asked a few people to view the light spectrum by holding a sheet of paper to catch the light reflected off an iridescent surface and then to describe what they were seeing without using the word “rainbow.” I had been wondering what would happen if I just asked people to enter a space where you can experience light and then asked them to articulate what their experience had been. Some people just described colors, some people described things that they saw in it or what it could be a metaphor for. I took those short phrases, pulled out one word out from each and reassembled them.
How well can language be used to describe something that is such a known phenomenon but is also magical? One of my goals is that the experience itself is the artwork and all of the elements that make up the installation are there to facilitate it. I am creating a space to experience wonder. Olafur Eliason once said, “Rainbows matter.” I just want people to think about how rainbows matter. I think that wonder is important. If I can make you, for even a split second, get lost and find yourself in a new space, then that’s really exciting.
GH: You have a background in the sciences. How has your scientific training shaped your current practice as an artist?
ST: I wouldn’t say that science alone is what molds or is the driving force in my practice, but I’ve always been interested in the ways that we create and retain knowledge. Approaching that process in a scientific way as well as an artistic and aes-thetic way is something that is really fascinating. I was also a student of dance, so there’s this idea that learning some-thing or getting to know something through your physical experience of the world is another way of gaining knowledge and understanding space. But there is something about the poetics and the irony of science that I’m drawn to. Scientific knowledge is always in a state of becoming, in that appears to be based in logic, reason and proof yet ideas are often disproven since the disciplines are always evolving and the limits of understanding are constantly changing.
GH: Glowing Wavelengths plays on many different dualities: flatness and dimensionality, weightlessness and ground-ed-ness, photograph and sculpture, light and pigment, to name a few. How do you use the interplay of these dualities to affect the viewer’s experience in the gallery space?
ST: That’s something that I’m intuitively trying to work out. It’s very important to me that there is an echo throughout
the work. When it happens and when it works well, you see or experience something at one point in the installation and then in another part of the installation, you see a similar idea or concept play out but in a different form. There’s an echo be-tween what you saw when you entered the space versus what you’re seeing now. I like how that all of sudden connects to a timed understanding and maybe makes you revisit where you were and trace yourself back. It’s similar to how I’m trying to trace or understand where I was with the earlier work. Those dualities that you described are how I start to play with the echo. For example, you’ll see light refracted in the gallery and then you’ll see a photograph of that light rendered in pigment on paper, but because of the proximity to the refracted light itself, you’re actually not sure if you’re seeing the refracted light dancing on that piece of paper or an image embedded in the paper as pigment.
GH: Right. It creates tension between the two things that you’re experiencing. There’s a pull between the two that makes you question what you’re looking at.
ST: Yes. I want the work to make you aware of how you can actively see. By disorienting you a little bit through that duality or echo, an awareness of how you’re seeing at that moment becomes clear.
