Through the wormhole

“An Imagining” by Sophia Dixon

by Danielle

Art Burst Chicago readers might remember our interview with Kyla Zoe Rafert last month. Rafert told us all about her mixed media exhibit “Life in the Aviary” at ACRE’s gallery. ACRE is a Chicago-based organization that supports and promotes emerging artists. Artists can sign themselves up, and every weekend an up-and-coming artist gets a chance to showcase their work at ACRE’s gallery, located in Pilsen. Last weekend, it was Sophia Dixon’s turn to put her drawings on display as part of the exhibit “Wormhole.” Along with Dixon’s drawings, mixed media artist Lauren Beck‘s new video and works on paper are also featured in “Wormhole.” Dixon granted a few minutes of her time to Art Burst Chicago and let us find out more about her and her drawings.

A.B.C.: Can you tell us a little bit about “Wormhole?”
Sophia Dixon: The drawings that I made for this show have a lot of the imagery that I’ve been working with for the last couple of years, in particular night scenes, wood grain, the sky, rocks, and basic architectural forms. They also have imagery that is new to my work, such as ectoplasmic (ghostlike, ed.) mist and trap doors; the latter partly inspired the title “Wormhole.” Lauren and I both had literal passageways in our recent drawings, and the idea of a hole or doorway into the darkness was meaningful to me.

A.B.C.: Lauren Beck is part of the exhibition as well. How do your works come together in “Wormhole?”
S.D.: Lauren and I are very close friends, former schoolmates and roommates, and collaborators. I am honored to show my work alongside of hers. She is an amazing artist. As I mentioned, there are some overlaps in the imagery that we are interested in. We have a lot in common and a lot that is different about us, and so does our work, so we thought it could be fruitful to let our work have a conversation in public. We are both into magical women, landscapes, and tensions between abstraction and representation. There is an intuitive aspect to both of our processes, but it manifests in different ways. How we set up our drawings compositionally is quite dissimilar. My drawings feel, to me, more oppressive, but perhaps that is because I have spent so many hours staring at them.

“Attic Song” by Sophia Dixon

A.B.C.: What inspires you when creating your pieces of art?
S.D.: Usually an artwork begins with an image that gets stuck in my head. It could be something that I see in passing on the street, take a photograph of, remember from a dream, or it might come from searching for images of a subject that interests me. For instance, one of the more abstract drawings in “Wormhole” came about this way: I googled “witch” (as I often do), hopped from website to website, found and printed out an old photograph of young women posing as witches for Halloween, and then became interested less in the girls than in the geometric design of a latticed screen behind them. I drew this screen over and over, using its elements to make a new composition. Two of my other drawings floated before my eyes as I was falling asleep on a plane. I forced myself to wake up and record them in my sketchbook.

“Monster Face” by Sophia Dixon

A.B.C.: What is the process of creating your drawings like?

S.D.: Larger drawings take quite a while to complete. I usually sketch out the drawing and then improvise within the boundaries that I’ve drawn. The patterns within forms wander and sort of free-associate. Sometimes shapes or images arise, or marks will start to look like paw prints or music notes. However, most of the drawings in “Wormhole” are a lot smaller, so there was less ground for improvisation. I approached them in a way that was new to me: I went through my current sketchbook and pulled out the nine images that I had been playing with that I liked the most. All of them involved both ruled lines and organic patterns. I drew out each one with the ruler, so that I had nine blueprints, and then went through and completed them one by one. This process arose out of necessity, since for the last month I have been spending every day in the hospital with my father while he recovers from an illness. That’s where I was doing my drawing, so I needed to work on something small.

A.B.C.: What would you like for viewers to take away from your work?
S.D.: I would like for my work to impact viewers emotionally in a way that they can’t quite put their finger on. I am interested in states of transition and transformation in my work, in dream logic and unconscious processes, and I would want my work to resonate with experiences of heightened states of awareness and potent ambivalence.

Visit ACRE’s gallery at 1913 W. 17th Street for new exhibits every weekend. Check out their exhibition schedule right here.
For more information on Sophia Dixon, visit her website.

Images courtesy of Sophia Dixon.