and then down became up: New Works by Sonja Thomsen Opening Reception
Free
Exhibition on view: March 15 - June 1, 2025
In and then down became up, Sonja Thomsen continues to weave an intricate narrative across time and space, bringing together the legacies of pioneering women artists through a multidisciplinary exploration of balance, perspective, and maternal lineage. As she moves along "the spiral of time," Thomsen collects and builds with women across history, transforming their stories into a constellation of interconnected works as she locates her place among them.
In this first iteration of and then down became up, Thomsen deploys her research-based practice, and her own experiences as a mother, to illuminate previously unseen connections between Lucia Moholy (1894-1989) and Hazel Larsen Archer (1921-2001)—two visionary women who shaped the avant-garde movements at the Bauhaus and its descendant, Black Mountain College. Building on prior explorations of Moholy and her work, Thomsen embarks on an investigation of Milwaukee native Larsen Archer. Larsen Archer attended Milwaukee State Teachers College before embarking on graduate studies at Black Mountain College, where she served in many roles, including first full-time teacher of photography. Her portraits of the artists gathered there—particularly her photographs of Merce Cunningham in motion—have appeared regularly in exhibitions documenting the experimental school. She left the college in 1953 and, eschewing exhibition, devoted most of her long life to her work as an influential educator.
Thomsen's work is grounded in a central question: What happens when matriarchy becomes the gravitational center? Thus, and then down becomes up is constructed around the metaphor of physical reorientation—the body leaning back, swinging up and around—as an act of recovering balance. With each shift in perspective, what once felt down becomes up, challenging viewers to reconsider their own relationship to gravity and equilibrium, to history and the present. Similarly, her creative process for this exhibition involves evolution, metamorphosis, and repurposing. Her layered photographs and objects draw from personal family narratives, companion artist writings, model making, and light as a phenomenon.
Designed as a cumulative, touring investigation, and then down becomes up begins at Lynden with an outdoor sculpture commission. The new work, visible just beyond the gallery’s windows, is echoed in the interior space in small, light-modulating objects, large-scale mural prints and transparencies, and photographs. As Thomsen draws Moholy and Larsen Archer into her orbit, a new work will emerge at each subsequent venue.
