I am a multi-disciplinary artist from Los Angeles. My work explores the relationship between geography, anthropology, humanity, and how these elements reflect on modern life. Shifting perspectives from the distant past to an imagined future underlie a body of work that I began over a decade ago and continue to develop today.
My work is deeply inspired by the southern California landscape: faults and seismic activity, the roads that unravel into the desert, the rock formations of the San Gabriels and the Mojave. My ties to the earthforms here are deep and personal. I have been trying to interpret the classic subject of landscape through various media for the current era, a time that will likely be looked back on as the point of separation for humans from geography, as more and more of our lives occur in a technologically mediated space. Our world and our intuitive sense of place no longer fit the Cartesian concept of a single point on a grid. Landscape, or whatever it should be termed now, is something far more complicated than it has been for the entirety of humanity that came before us.
In my work, I want to reveal the break, the line where human-made turns to organic chaos, to find the edge of civilization as concrete becomes rubble, structures dissolve into mounds, and the body disappears into dust. To this end, I employ representation and abstraction concurrently, allowing the painted image or sculptural form to both breakdown and emerge. My preferred painting medium is oil on canvas, but I love the matte qualities available in acrylic paint. Most of my paintings now begin with an underpainting of tinted acrylic gesso, followed by the rendering of the primary subject in oil. About fifteen years ago, I began to expand painting into a three-dimensional space. This practice developed organically from the need to build maquettes for use in painting. Today large installations, freestanding or suspended sculpture, pairings of painting and sculpture, and sculptural forms used as substrates for painting are all part of my artistic repertoire.
–Sonja Schenk