Galleries One & Two
During the time when he called the White House home, his strong leadership would begin to falter, which Mr. Richard M. Nixon would attribute to the presence of oval rooms in the executive residence. Too many ovals omitted an excessive, unseemly amount of expressive feminine energy. Mr. Richard M. Nixon ordered the oval rooms to be turned into rectilinear rooms, to no avail. Reflecting upon his life, post-presidency, Mr. Nixon was convinced that the ovals were mainly responsible for the road towards his impeachment.
Excerpt from Mr. Richard M. Nixon’s Difficulties with Ovals, Version 2
For her 4th solo show at Western Exhibitions, Deb Sokolow will present two bodies of work: Profiles in Leadership — new narrative drawings that blend fact with fiction and speculate both comically and critically on the foibles of famous men in leadership roles and Drawings without words — Sokolow’s first ever foray into abstraction. The show will open with a public reception on Friday, November 8 from 5 to 8pm and will run through December 21. Gallery hours are 11am to 6pm, Tuesday to Saturday.
In Gallery 1, Sokolow’s drawings incorporate the voice of an unnamed narrator of questionable authority who recounts seemingly humorous, harmless anecdotes on a number of famous men such as Richard M. Nixon, Fidel Castro and Frank Lloyd Wright while also suggesting a more sinister mix of machismo, narcissism and insecurity at play. Lines between fact and fiction blur, while the tone shifts from objectivity to admiration and sarcasm. The viewer is left to decipher how much is true and to determine when, if ever, a narrator can be trusted. Sokolow’s interests in storytelling and unreliable narration take inspiration from contemporary politics and its competing narratives on events and individuals as well as the playfulness with form and humor found in postmodern literature and authors such as Jorge Borges, Thomas Pynchon, Helen Oyeyemi and Ali Smith.
Hand-drawn texts in graphite and erasure marks on the surface of each drawing function as a visual record of the narrator’s indecisive thought process in working to present each anecdote. The texts are paired with abstract shapes and diagrammatic visuals which reference the historically male-dominated movements of modern architecture, color field painting and minimalism. Many of these visuals appear to be reproduced with a printmaking process. Instead, they are hand-rendered with colored pencils and crayons and function as a conceptual compliment to the texts in that they also contain uncertainties with regard to the fabrication of content.
Gallery 2 features a new, parallel track in Sokolow’s work— drawings which do not include the presence of handwritten text. Sokolow has often entertained this idea by covering her studio walls with an immersive, salon-style display of scraps of color and diagrammatic fragments. These fragments would eventually be paired with texts in the last stage of a drawing’s completion. In the last year, Sokolow has developed some of these visuals into finished, text-less drawings which take inspiration from Sokolow’s 2005 encounter with a ghost-like entity in the Winchester Mystery House in San Jose, California. The drawings combine architectural schematics with references to hidden rooms, shifting walls, smells, floating shapes, labyrinths, hypnosis, Madame Blavatsky (co-founder of the Theosophical Society in 1875) and the architectural fictions of writers Jorge Luis Borges and Mark Danielewski.
Deb Sokolow is an artist and writer. She currently has drawings on view in Manifesto: Art X Agency at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, D.C. and has been included in the 4th Athens Biennale in Greece and in other group exhibitions at The Drawing Center in New York; Museum für Gegenwartskunst Siegen in Germany; Van Abbemuseum in the Netherlands; and the Institute of Contemporary Art in Philadelphia. Solo exhibitions include the Abrons Art Center in New York; Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago; Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art in Kansas City; Institute of Visual Arts in Milwaukee; and the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, in which Sokolow’s 2013 MATRIX exhibition, Some Concerns About the Candidate, was reviewed in the New York Times. Her work has been reproduced for Creative Time’s Comics project; for Swedish art magazine, Paletten; in Vitamin D2, a survey on contemporary drawing; and in a several-page spread in the fall 2018 issue of BOMB Magazine. Her work is in the permanent collections of the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, D.C.; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago; Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art in Hartford, CT; Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art; Kinsey Institute for Research in Sex, Gender, and Reproduction in Indiana; and the Thomas J Watson Library at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY. Sokolow is a recipient of an Artadia award and residencies at Art Omi and Nordic Artists’ Centre in Norway. She received her MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2004. She is represented by Western Exhibitions and lives and works in Chicago.