Project Space Residency

Sonja Thomsen is an American artist whose multifaceted practice choreographs light in space, photograph and sculpture. Thomsen is a woman working in abstraction, trained in the sciences, whose practice is beguiled by the plurality of light. Thomsen’s installation practice creates space for wonder as a radical way to imagine post-patriarchal futures.

Sonja Thomsen’s artist book ‘You will find it where it is: a reader’ was published by Poor Farm Press in 2020. She has exhibited with Bauhaus Archiv Berlin, The Suburban Milwaukee, Soccer Club Club Chicago, Higher Pictures NY, DePaul Art Museum, Center for Photography at Woodstock, the Reykjavik Museum of Photography, New Mexico Museum of Art, Madison Museum of Contemporary Art, Gallery f5,6 in Munich and Fonderia 20.9 in Verona IT among others. Her most recent installation, Orbiting Lucia (2022-2023), was a part of the exhibition ‘Refracting Histories,’ at the Museum of Contemporary Photography in Chicago IL. 

As an artist, I am interested in centering matriarchal forces and creating space for wonder, articulated in an object-based practice, which encompasses artist books, light modulating mobiles, and photographic installations. I build spaces that reflect and refract light as a means of surfacing the work of brilliant women who have been omitted from the narrative. I reject the idea of the singular fetishized art object as part of the lineage of exclusion. Instead my work is an ongoing process of making of reuse, and of collaboration that is site responsive and begins with photography.

VSW Project Space Residencies are supported by the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of the New York State Legislature, Monroe County, and Joy of Giving Something.