"We Emerge," "Antipode" (Triptych installation view, 60" x 72" each, oil, acrylic, gold and silver leaf on canvas) Sonja Schenk, 2024.
Light for the Sun is an ongoing multi-phase inquiry that begins with the idea that extraction is a one-way transaction: you can’t put it back. Originally inspired by a residency in the Gold Rush territory of northern California, the first iteration of Light for the Sun sought to return the gold to California by adding veins of gold leaf to natural boulders sourced from a quarry. This powerless act of atonement appears ridiculous at first, but in fact it does more than merely assuage negative feelings. Like other symbolic gestures—the handshake, the Merkel-Raute, ritual cleansing—it is capable of carving new paths of action in society, to create change and transformation on a collective scale. Living under the shadow of climate change, a problem so insurmountable that the most natural reaction is indeed to ignore it. Light for the Sun aims to work in small ways to facilitate the goal of large change. Works in the project include the eponymous Light for the Sun sculpture, large-scale modular paintings We Emerge Without a Guide or a Map and Antipode of the Sun, and a forthcoming sculpture series of paper-based likenesses of rocks called Doppelgänger.
Cave Drawing #1 (6" x 7" x 18" ink on paper) 2025.
Cave Drawings is a series of sculptures that resemble rock formations. It explores the formal qualities of a most basic art form, one that can trace a path back to the Stone Age. Although sculptural in form with a trompe l’oeil appearance of stone, these “rocks” consist primarily of ink on paper: they are drawings.
The Dig (detail, oil and acrylic on canvas, 60" x 72") 2025.
The Sifters (series) imagines a post post-apocalyptic time, when human survivors desperately seek to understand the past and prognosticate the future. Works in the series include The Dig, Teal Vessel, Junipero Ficus, Naming Ceremony, Evidence, and The Clearing.
Cave Drawings (assorted, 12" - 28", ink on paper) 2025.
Teal Vessel (oil and acrylic on canvas, 72" x 60") 2026.
Solo Exhibition
Lancaster Museum of Art and History, Summer 2024
The intersection of the natural world and humankind is key to Sonja Schenk’s artistic practice, which explores this convergence through a variety of forms: painting, sculpture, installation, and time-based media. Like the light of the sun, the resources of the earth are a one-way exchange: once removed, mined, extracted, used, or consumed they cannot be restored.
The Clearing (oil and acrylic on canvas, 48" x 60") 2025.
Light for the Sun II: We Emerge Without a Guide or a Map, upper diptych 120" x 72" oil, acrylic, 24k gold, on canvas; 2024 and Antipode of the Sun, lower diptych, 120" x 72" oil, acrylic, 24k gold on canvas, 2024.
Light for the Sun II: We Emerge Without a Guide or a Map, upper diptych (detail) 120" x 72" oil, acrylic, 24k gold; 2024