Artist Deb Sokolow produces elaborate text-based drawings that obsessively mine the lives of famous individuals, organizations and events, constructing alternative histories that blur the boundaries between fact and fiction. Taking on the persuasive tone of a conspiracy theory, Sokolow’s diagrammatic drawings––whose formal elements borrow from architectural elevations and storyboards––offer up an abundance of evidence, but leave it up to viewers to draw their own conclusions from the information at hand.

Sokolow returns to a favorite subject for this exhibition, with nine new works that focus on the personal life of American architect Frank Lloyd Wright. With no linear narrative, these drawings integrate biographical research, comical speculation and circumstantial evidence in order to illuminate the private activities of Wright, his third wife, Olgivanna, and a number of studio apprentices who lived and worked at his famous Taliesin compound.

Deb Sokolow is the second artist of Syntax Season, a series of solo exhibitions organized by A\M that brings together eight artists whose practices engage in various kinds of language games. Working with words, text, text-like images and image-like texts, these artists consider how we engage with language and, more specifically, how we construct meaning.

For more information about Syntax Season and upcoming artists, please visit www.amweb.site.

HOURS:

Tue-Sat:
12:00 pm – 7:00 pm
Sun:
12:00 pm – 5:00 pm

ABOUT THE ARTIST:

DEB SOKOLOW is a Chicago-based artist and writer. Her work 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 and Western Exhibitions 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, and in Vitamin D2, a survey on contemporary drawing. Her work is in the permanent collections of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art, Kinsey Institute for Research in Sex, Gender, and Reproduction 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. www.debsokolow.com

PRINTtEXT is a multi-disciplinary space—a magazine shop, a studio, a meeting place, among other things. http://printtext.co/

A\M is a curatorial collective based in Indianapolis. Syntax Season is organized by Michael Milano and Elisabeth Smith. www.amweb.site