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.
In my art, 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 work is deeply inspired by the landscape of southern California where I live: faults and seismic activity, caves and the artistic traces of past inhabitants, stone formations of the San Gabriels, the Sierras, and the Mojave. My ties to the earthforms here are deep and personal. Exploring the nature in and around Los Angeles provides a perspective that allows me to look unflinchingly at difficult topics. In the studio, I use motifs pulled from archaeology, mysticism, and trickery to create a unique visual vocabulary that reflects the unsettled world I seek to understand.
–Sonja Schenk