Sonja Thomsen

Lives and works in Milwaukee, WI, USA

Artist statement

I build luminous installations using light modulating sculpture, photograms, video and layered photographic collage. My material vocabulary includes mobiles and large geometric forms that refract light and activate the edges of perception, alongside silver gelatin and digital photographs held in tension. For two decades my practice has centered on recovering women whose labor built the visual record of modernism, women whose authorship was severed from their own images. My current project, Two Schools, is a multi channel film and traveling installation pairing Lucia Moholy, who documented the Bauhaus in Dessau, and Hazel Larsen Archer, the primary photographer of Black Mountain College. Both women made the archive the canon used to understand itself, and neither was admitted to that understanding. I use my own body, geography and material practice as a lens that bends historical light back toward these figures, a methodology I call gravitational lensing. Collages function as thinking tools, rephotographed in specific locations where light becomes material. Sound design layers multiple voices, including archival recordings and my own. Care and labor run through this work as material fact, not metaphor. Hands, teaching, tending and looking appear as the unacknowledged infrastructure beneath the historical record. Collaboration does not require shared presence, only shared attention.

Artwork