Western Exhibitions

Chicago
westernexhibitions.com

@westernexhibitions / scott@westernexhibitions.com / Future Fair Voices: Western Exhibitions / Artsy

Western Exhibitions presents a solo presentation of works by American artist, Deb Sokolow.

Deb Sokolow’s narrative drawings and artist books blend fact with fiction and speculate both comically and critically on the foibles of male heads of state.

Sokolow’s drawings incorporate the voice of an unnamed narrator of questionable authority who recounts seemingly humorous, harmless anecdotes on a number of famous men such as Richard M. Nixon, Fidel Castro and Frank Lloyd Wright while also suggesting a more sinister mix of machismo, narcissism and insecurity at play. Lines between fact and fiction blur, while the tone shifts from objectivity to admiration and sarcasm. The viewer is left to decipher how much is true and to determine when, if ever, a narrator can be trusted. Sokolow’s interests in storytelling and unreliable narration take inspiration from contemporary politics and its competing narratives on events and individuals as well as the playfulness with form and humor found in postmodern literature and authors such as Jorge Borges, Thomas Pynchon, Helen Oyeyemi and Ali Smith.

Hand-drawn texts in graphite and erasure marks on the surface of each drawing function as a visual record of the narrator’s indecisive thought process in working to present each anecdote. The texts are paired with abstract shapes and diagrammatic visuals which reference the historically male-dominated movements of modern architecture, color field painting and minimalism. Many of these visuals appear to be reproduced with a printmaking process. Instead, they are hand-rendered with colored pencils and crayons and function as a conceptual compliment to the texts in that they also contain uncertainties with regard to the fabrication of content.

Western Exhibitions will also feature a new, parallel track in Sokolow’s work— drawings which do not include the presence of handwritten text. Sokolow has often entertained this idea by covering her studio walls with an immersive, salon-style display of scraps of color and diagrammatic fragments. These fragments would eventually be paired with texts in the last stage of a drawing’s completion. In the last year, Sokolow has worked to develop some of these visuals into finished drawings without a specific narrative context. Similar to her text-driven work, these drawings also include schematics of a political, architectural, astronomical or ghost-like nature, but the specific references are intentionally ambiguous, or, to use Sokolow’s words, “I love a good mystery.”

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