Sonya Clark

Region: South

I investigate simple objects as cultural interfaces through which I navigate accord and discord. When trying to unravel complex issues, I am instinctively drawn to things that connect to my personal narrative as a point of departure: a comb, a piece of cloth, or a strand of hair. Charged with agency, objects have the mysterious ability to reflect or absorb us. I find my image, my personal story, in an object. But it is also the object’s ability to act as a rhizome, the multiple ways in which it can be discovered or read, that draws me in. To sustain my practice, I milk the object and its image. I question the viewer about collective meaning. My stories, your stories, our stories are held in the object. In this way, the everyday “thing” becomes a lens through which we may better see one another. A visual vocabulary derived from object and image forms a language that ranges from the vernacular to the political to the poetic.