At Show Gallery off Sunset Blvd. in West Hollywood, Sonja Schenk’s New Mountain is a beautiful mix of oil and acrylic works on canvas and sculptural works. Schenk describes her work as depicting “hyper objects,” which until recently were “earth, fire, water, air, all the natural things. Today you have plastic, landfills, a new landscape that is a combination of plastic waste and natural materials.”
Looking to the future in New Mountain, Schenk offers work that posits a world in which manmade materials are fused with natural – granite mountains and plastic, crystalline forms that are created using “intentional repetition.” The gorgeous, almost alien mountainous forms the artist creates were in part inspired by visits to relatives in Switzerland as a child, where stunning snow capped vistas were depicted in drawings, sometimes altered and given human forms or names that reflected their natural formations.
Schenk’s work is powerful and glowing; the first in her series created for the show is “Silver Mountain,” which in featuring silver leaf in its composition, literally glints.
“Empire” depicts a scaffold shrouded, aged ship – a vestige of the past that is being preserved or reconstructed, a somewhat fragile yet lasting form.
With no horizon line, the pale peach, blues, and pinks that make up the background of her works make the mountains in the foreground seem to float; a floating chunk of ice/mountain/artificial material – take your pick – is literally depicted in a beautiful hanging sculptural work, “Known Unknown,” shaped from gypsum, resin, and polyurethane.
Her titular “New Mountain” piece is strikingly gestational, as if a mountain were being created, birthed, before the viewer’s eyes.
The exhibition is a fascinating look at both an imagined, futuristic world, and one that is realistically shaped. The wonder of it is both how beautiful and how curious a world the artist has created. Reaching almost beyond and inside the artwork itself is a mythic story, a superbly detailed examination of something that could foreseeably come true, and the strange beauty in that story.
Above the well-curated exhibition in a loft space, Schenk is working for the next week on new projects; come meet her at her residency.
Show Gallery is located at 1515 N. Gardner in West Hollywood. The exhibition runs through the 12th.
- Genie Davis; photos: Genie Davis