(detail) awakening &, 2025, latex print on vinyl, variable dimensions
Opening reception: Saturday, March 15, 2025, 2-5 pm
In and then down became up, Sonja Thomsen weaves gestures across time and space, bringing together the legacies of pioneering women artists through a multidisciplinary exploration of balance, perspective, and maternal lineage. As she moves along the spiral of time, Thomsen collects and builds with women across history, transforming their stories into a constellation of interconnected works as she locates her place among them.
Thomsen’s work is grounded in a central question: What happens when women become the gravitational center? and then down became up is constructed around the metaphor of physical reorientation—the body leaning back, swinging up and around—as an act of rediscovering balance. With each shift in perspective, what once felt down becomes up, challenging viewers to reconsider their own relationship to gravity and equilibrium, to history and the present.
Designed as a cumulative, touring investigation, and then down became up begins—as befits its location at Lynden—with an outdoor sculpture commission and an emphasis on Thomsen’s 3D practice. embrace (transverse), visible just beyond the gallery’s windows, is echoed in the interior space by light-modulating mobiles, large-scale mural prints and transparencies, and photographs. Thomsen’s creative process for this exhibition involves evolution, metamorphosis, and repurposing. Her objects and layered photographs draw from personal narratives, the work of her companion artists, and light as a phenomenon.
In this first iteration of and then down became up, Thomsen deploys her research-based practice, and her experiences as a woman and artist, to respond to Lucia Moholy and Hazel Larsen Archer, two visionary women who shaped the avant-garde movements at the Bauhaus and its descendant, Black Mountain College. Building on prior explorations of Moholy and her work, Thomsen embarks on an investigation of Milwaukee native Larsen Archer. Larsen Archer attended Milwaukee State Teachers College before graduate studies at Black Mountain College, where she ultimately served in many roles, including first full-time teacher of photography. Her portraits of the artists gathered there—particularly her photographs of Merce Cunningham in motion—have appeared regularly in exhibitions documenting the experimental school. Larsen Archer left the college in 1953 and, eschewing exhibition, devoted most of her long life to her work as an influential educator.
and then down became up makes a compelling case for the unique experiences of women artists and, by delving into the history of photography to construct creative matrilineages, challenges our understanding of Modernism.
About the Artist
Sonja Thomsen (American, b.1978) harnesses light as both medium and metaphor in her interdisciplinary practice. She has exhibited at the Bauhaus-Archiv, Berlin; the Reykjavik Museum of Photography; Fonderia 20.9 Gallery, Verona, Italy; the New Mexico Museum of Art, Santa Fe; Higher Pictures, New York; the DePaul Art Museum, the Museum of Contemporary Photography, Soccer Club Club, Chicago; the John Michael Kohler Arts Center, Sheboygan; the Madison Museum of Contemporary Art; and The Suburban, Milwaukee, among others. Her work resides in the collections of many of the institutions where she has exhibited, as well as in those of the Art Institute of Chicago, the Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library at Yale University, and the Milwaukee Art Museum. She is the recipient of the Greater Milwaukee Foundation’s Mary L. Nohl Fellowship for Individual Artists (2011), the Ruth Arts Mary L. Nohl Alumni Award (2023), the Milwaukee Arts Board New Work Commission, and the Hermitage Artist Fellowship. She was recently awarded a Josef Breitenbach Research Fellowship at the Center for Creative Photography at the University of Arizona, and in April she will be a BMCM+AC Active Archive Resident at the historic Black Mountain College Lake Eden campus.Thomsen is currently Full Professor, Adjunct in Photography at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
