Sonja Thomsen's Nexus

Sonja Thomsen "Oil Self Portrait" inkjet print © 2013

Milwaukee artist Sonja Thomsen visited Lawrence University Department of Art & Art History on April 9-10, 2013 to talk about her projects and critique student work in conjunction with her Nexus installation at the Wriston Art Center Galleries. Her last visit to LU was April 28, 2010, for a lecture on her water-related work and to meet with students. The Nexus series (an ongoing project since 2010) creates the "skin between memory, place and the present." Her Epson inkjet prints on Hahnemuhle paper are mounted and displayed on shelves hung at varying heights to "play with the perceptual shifting of scales" and are sometimes purposely disorienting to viewers. We first met Sonja in 2005 at Milwaukee Institute of Art & Design just after she received her MFA from San Francisco Art Institute. We were visiting artists brought in to critique senior work. She had just started teaching photography courses part-time and was critiquing with us. Since then, her work has evolved to include installation and sculpture. Her images have become more abstract while functioning as critical views of the important issues of our time, ranging from family life to big oil. These investigations exist in an intellectual space that combines philosophy, science, and aesthetics. Her work is in the permanent collections of Milwaukee Art Museum, Ljosmyndasafn Reykjavikur, and the Midwest Photographers Project at MoCP. She has won numerous prestigious grants and fellowships including the Greater Milwaukee Mary Nohl Fellowship for Established Artists

Sonja Thomsen critiques Digital Processes student
Emma Moss's inkjet prints on April 10, 2013 in Steitz Hall

Journey Form & the Encounter

Appleton, Wisconsin Food Desert Map as depicted on usda.gov

When we heard that the USDA identified a neighborhood near our campus as a Food Desert, we designed a "journey form" project to check into it as we read Nicolas Bourriaud's 1998 book, Relational Aesthetics. The USDA website revealed their mission to identify and help urban or rural areas without ready access to fresh, healthy, and affordable food define a food desert. In these zones, fast food restaurants and convenience stores provide the only food option, which ultimately contribute to a poor diet leading to higher levels of obesity and diet-related diseases, such as diabetes and heart disease. We gave five students (Maria Ayala, Rachele Krivichi, Jessica Meismer, Sara Sheldon-Rosson, Paul Smirl) a crisp $10 and asked them to use it to purchase the healthiest food they could find on foot within the Appleton food desert. The students documented their journey and encounters with photographs and videos then gave the food they bought away or shared it with friends and strangers.

$33.29 from Blurb

Together we compiled a book titled One Hour and Ten Bucks in a Food Desert available online from Blurb.com. Students also posted 30-second experimental videos on YouTube. Mari Aylala's "Oh, Melet!", "Rachele Krivichi's "Division to Badger Street", Jessica Meismer's "$10 in a Food Desert", Sara Sheldon-Rosson's "Dinner in the Desert" and Paul Smirl's "Food Desert Shopping" communicate five perspectives on their individual experience in the food desert one mild day in January. Mari gleefully tripped upon a gourmet food market with mostly organic ingredients to make an omelet. Rachele heard a retail associate say, "We don't really have anything healthy here" yet found dates, Mango juice, and a banana among the hallucinogenic food posters that pulsated along her path. Jessica found a peanut butter granola pita sandwich, a banana, fruit smoothie, and a salad and got change back for her $10. Sara ended up at a convenience store that charged sales tax on items that normally wouldn't be taxed at a grocery store perhaps because they fall in the gray-area of "prepared food." Still, it's tough to consider canned Green Giant cut green beans and Del Monte sliced peaches prepared. Paul found his path strewn with Americana kitsch and trash but ended up with a loaf of wheat bread and noodles from an Asian food store. A feast, perhaps, for some.

The Farther One Travels, the Less One Knows

"Strange God" copyright 2010 Estate of Bernard Gilardi

Gallerist and art historian Debra Brehmer of Portrait Society Gallery, Milwaukee drove home the point that Bernard Gilardi (1920-2008) focused his imagination in the space of a basement for four decades to express the world within his head. His identities as father, husband, Italian, war veteran, lithographer, Milwaukee, Wisconsin resident informed his work as reflected in an exhibition of his "religious" paintings on view at Lawrence University's Wriston Art Center Galleries January 6-March 11, 2012. Pop culture infiltrated and informed his nirvana from blow dried hair and unisex fashions to Jesus Christ Superstar and the Wisconsin State Fair. His art practice, though without support or detraction from the art establishment, enabled him to fully articulate an inner universe his family described as "primitive" in his obituary. "Inner Light", the old Beatles 45 RPM flipside of "Lady Madonna" written by George Harrison, drones: "Without going out of your door, you can know the ways of heaven" bringing to mind Gilardi and his sacred cosmic comic basement space.