The Leader

Issue date: 4/23/09 Section: Features/News

Media Credit: Mike Stolp-Smith

Media Credit: Mike Stolp-Smith

From a quaint gallery in the "once upon a time" shoe factory to a university art museum, Sonja Thomsen is making her mark all across Milwaukee. Thomsen is an adjunct faculty member at MIAD where she teaches photography to undergraduates and in adult education. The interaction between Thomsen and her students create a passionate play between being inspired and being an inspiration, and gives her the wonderful opportunity to fully engaged in art everyday.

Thomsen's overall theme in her work is focused on the idea of natural phenomenon and how she identifies the unknown by exploring such natural elements, like water and oil, specifically motor oil. Thomsen describes her approach to make these invisibilities visible by "convergence at the surface, and explores the imperceptible and scared in the commonplace."

According to a conversation with NYMphoto, Thomsen comes from a "socially engaged and culturally aware family", and she gives much credit to her family, who has been a huge source of encouragement and provoked this desire of discovery. It was in grad school, where Thomsen discovered her passionate relationship with water. Extremely influenced by the statement, "a milliliter of water is more complex (genetically) than the human genome." This was completely "mind-blowing" to her, so began to explore this play between micro and macro levels that as also been inspired by the "Power of Ten" and the Zen Buddhist philosophy of nothingness. "Power of Ten" explores the relationship between the microscopic and the cosmic within size, and how the universe is this place of both continuity and change.

Thomsen saw photography as a means to push her interest in the relationship between macro and micro, which created this interest in "the metaphor of what lies beneath the surface," explains Thomsen. She begins her work through her personal experiences and interaction. Her usage of oil as a medium makes it visible. She creates a personal relationship with the war and her own consumption of petroleum.

The Armoury Gallery's eighth show, Night Works, features artwork from Milwaukee based art professors from MIAD and UWM. Artists include two collaborative teams, Shana McCaw and Brent Budsberg, Nathaniel Stern and Jessica Meuninck-Ganger, and individual works done by Nicholas Lampert and Thomsen. The center focus is the idea that these art works are created during the after hours of their careers.

Thomsen's pieces at the Armoury Gallery are of a large grid called petrified featuring 90 prints of collected shark teeth. During an artist's retreat on Florida's Manasota Key, Thomsen collected several shark teeth. This discovery of indispensible amount of shark teeth triggered the fascination of the teeth's history and origins. "The teeth that I was picking up in this present moment at 10's of 1000's of years old. I was holding mini time capsules in the palm of my hand," describes Thomsen. With the large grid in the Armoury Gallery, Thomsen wanted to create this sense of wonder upon her viewers, and walking into the back section of the gallery placed on all three walls are her prints that are perfectly detailed teeth that create this abstraction on the surfaces created all varieties of color and form.

The Haggerty Art Museum's current exhibition, Current Tendencies, features 10 of the most talented artists in Wisconsin. The exhibit takes over the gallery with site- based installations to floor-to-ceiling wall drawings. Alongside Thomsen, the other artists featured are Jennifer Angus, Peter Bardy, Anne Kingsbury, Colin Matthes, Shana McCaw, Brent Budsberg,?T. L. Solien, George Williams Jr., and Xiaohong Zhang. In similarity to the Armoury Gallery, Current Tendencies focuses on works from various mediums by "emerging, mid-career and established Wisconsin artists," according to the Haggerty Art Museum.

Lacuna is an installations of photos displayed in the Current Tendencies show now featured in the Haggerty Art Museum. The photos apart of this installation is a collection of photos, Thomsen had taken over a span of the four years after returning from San Francisco and feature family, friends, and "curious" landscapes. Where 'lacuna' refers to a gap in literature or art and also a small cavity in a bone, the installation explores the idea of what is missing in knowledge and emptiness in the human body. These photos "communicate the idea of the intangible and the suggestive narrative, rather than being specifically sentimental or directive," desire Thomsen. Thomsen does a wonderful job of creating the emotion of emptiness and an open abyss, which creates a narrative focusing on "youth, sensuality, sexuality, individuality, and aging."

Thomsen's passion for discovering the unknown and embracing the intangible creates strong wonderment and emotions. She confronts ideas or visibilities that most people barely notice, and her expressive displays of photos help encourage viewers to also explore and desire to make tangible the intangible.

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