LIGHT SLIP: ARCHIVE, ABSTRACTION, & PHENOMENA

Filter Photo is pleased to present Light Slip: Archive, Abstraction, and Phenomena, a two-person exhibition by Sonja Thomsen and Aaron R. Turner.  The works on view explore the boundaries of the photographic image, sculpture, space, geometric abstraction, and history.

Sonja Thomsen's interdisciplinary practice places photography at its core, expanding the medium beyond its traditional boundaries to harness light as both medium and metaphor. Her work transforms photographic thinking into immersive installations that blur boundaries between image, sculpture, and architecture, inviting audiences to question how they see and understand the world.

Working at the intersection of feminist theory and scientific inquiry, she employs photographic processes to center matrifocal networks and choreograph space for wonder. Thomsen responds specifically to photographers Lucia Moholy and Hazel Larsen Archer, visionary women who shaped photographic practices at the Bauhaus and Black Mountain College. Her work challenges conventional understandings of photographic Modernism by delving into photography's history to construct creative matrilineages. Through photography, Thomsen illuminates the overlooked histories of women photographers, weaving these narratives into contemporary conversations about image-making, gender, and knowledge production.

Through his series Black Alchemy, Aaron Turner is primarily concerned with constructing images that address abstraction, history, the pictorial aspects of blackness as material, surveillance, artificial intelligence, the archive, the discursive enterprise, and the artists' role in the studio space. Black Alchemy provides a lens through which he sees the world while simultaneously considering the past, present, and future. He uses light in combination with geometric abstraction painting to shift questions of identity, the historical narrative, and the discourse of photography.

Turner's work is also grounded in a photographic perspective and the use of the archive image as a material device, staging intuitive scenes using projections, printed matter, an array of papers cut and strewn, and various mechanical apparatus used in photographic production. He focuses on imagery related to black historical figures, such as Frederick Douglas, who are often juxtaposed with images from various archives. Through his staged manipulations that play heavily with light as material, Turner obscures, loosens, and complicates our view of his subjects, creating pieces that resist graspability yet imply an attempt at resurfacing and recalibrating.

Thomsen and Turner both build intuitive installations in response to space. They use glass, mirrors, metallic surfaces, fabric texture, and light projection that shift with viewers' movement, creating dynamic environments that resist fixed interpretation.

About the Artists

Sonja Thomsen (American, b.1978) harnesses light as both medium and metaphor in her interdisciplinary practice. She has exhibited at the Bauhaus-Archiv, Berlin; the Reykjavik Museum of Photography; Fonderia 20.9 Gallery, Verona, Italy; the New Mexico Museum of Art, Santa Fe; Higher Pictures, New York; the DePaul Art Museum, the Museum of Contemporary Photography, Soccer Club Club, Chicago; the John Michael Kohler Arts Center, Sheboygan; the Madison Museum of Contemporary Art; and The Suburban, Milwaukee, among others. Her work resides in the collections of many of the institutions where she has exhibited, as well as in those of the Art Institute of Chicago, the Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library at Yale University, and the Milwaukee Art Museum. She is the recipient of the Greater Milwaukee Foundation’s Mary L. Nohl Fellowship for Individual Artists (2011), the Ruth Arts Mary L. Nohl Alumni Award (2023), the Milwaukee Arts Board New Work Commission, and the Hermitage Artist Fellowship. She was recently awarded a Josef Breitenbach Research Fellowship at the Center for Creative Photography at the University of Arizona, and was a BMCM+AC Active Archive Resident at the historic Black Mountain College Lake Eden campus. Thomsen is currently Full Professor, Adjunct in Photography at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

Aaron Turner is an artist and educator born and raised in the Arkansas Delta. He uses photography as a transformative process to understand the ideas of home and resilience; he also uses the 4x5 view camera to create still-life studies on identity, history, blackness as material, abstraction, and the Archive. His most recent book, Moves from the Archive, highlights the varied approach to image making, fusing elements of still life, appropriation, and painting to comment on the complex nature of Black American history and representation.

Aaron received his M.A. from Ohio University and an M.F.A from Mason Gross School of the Arts, Rutgers University. He was a 2018 Light Work Artists-in-Residence at Syracuse University, 2019 EnFoco Photography Fellow, a 2020 Visual Studies Workshop Project Space Artists-in- Residence, a 2020 Artist 360 Mid-America Arts Alliance Grant Recipient, the 2021 Houston Center for Photography Fellowship Recipient, a 2021 Creators Lab Photo Fund recipient from Google’s Creator Labs & the Aperture Foundation, 2022 Darryl Chappell Foundation photographer-in- residence at Ogden Museum of Southern Art, 2023 Individual Artist Fellowship form the Arkansas Arts Council, and a 2024 Penumbra Workspace artist-in-residence.

His work has been included in exhibitions at the Museum Of Contemporary Photography Chicago, Memphis Brooks Museum of Art, the Ogden Museum of Southern Art, Arkansas Museum of Fine Arts, Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, New Orleans Museum of Art, Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center, Vassar College, George Eastman Museum, Houston Center for Photography, Light Work, Penumbra Foundation, SF Cameraworks, Photo Access Australia, Filter Photo, and Center for Photography at Woodstock.