CHICAGO — A random survey of recent architectural news items includes descriptions of: eco-certified ultra-luxury resorts in the Red Sea, the fact that less than half of one percent of licensed architects in the United States are Black women, and an analysis of how Russia has targeted historic landmarks as part of its war on Ukraine.
In times like these, Deb Sokolow is an artist we very much deserve.
Sokolow, who was born in 1974 in Davis, California, but has lived in Chicago since 1996, makes architectural drawings. Well, not really. She uses graphite, wax crayons, colored pencils, ink, and collage to create two-and-a-half-dimensional artworks whose parts resemble the floor plans, sections, and elevations found in the traditional working drawings of architects — the extra half-dimension is for shallow folded paper components that pop out perpendicular to her otherwise flat surfaces. Plenty are the overlapping geometric shapes, handy perspectival lines, orderly grid markings, blueprint-like effects, and neat squarish handwriting. But you could sooner construct a building from my lunch than from Sokolow’s diagrams.
Sixteen of these drawings, plus one wall installation, are currently on view in Visualizing, a solo exhibition of Sokolow’s crackerjack recent work, up through December 16 at Western Exhibitions. (Additionally, she has a selection of earlier work on display in the Cultural Center as part of the fifth Chicago Architecture Biennial. The best of these are a trio of artist books, including her feministically revisionist telling of the story of Frank Lloyd Wright and a series of three-legged chairs he designed for the Johnson Wax Company Headquarters. The secretaries were not happy.)
Visualizing’s overarching concern is with the coercive potential of built environments. That’s a profoundly unsettling aspect of the union of modern design, advanced psychology, and hierarchical institutions, and it pays to have a somewhat paranoid — and deadpan funny — person leading the discussion. What specifically is Sokolow so worried about? Her titles, all of which are included as text in the drawings themselves, provide a sense of the problems at hand: “Visualizing the Manipulation of Light in a Built Environment for Various Agendas,” “Visualizing Empathic Architecture,” “Visualizing Objects Designed to Appear Emotionally Desirable,” “Visualizing Walls Which Visibly Register an Individual’s Mood Fluctuations,” and so on. There’s also “Visualizing Wellness Architecture Incorporating Kermit the Frog-Themed Emotions and Aesthetics,” but that demands additional clarification, to come.
Further written details, in these and other large-scale drawings, and in a series of smaller, rougher “Thinking Drawings,” where she works out related ideas, expand on the situations ostensibly illustrated therein. Ostensibly, because it would be more accurate to describe Sokolow’s compositions as abstract than illustrational. Bits of beautifully hand-colored paper, dozens of meticulously drawn shapes, oodles of pop-up constructions recur from picture to picture, radically recontextualized by titles and annotations. For those who missed the point, there’s an entire wall covered in studio remnants, uncaptioned and waiting to be made meaningful. Let’s say her drawings, um, pretend to be illustrational?
What is quasi-illustrated, then, is how light can evoke a godlike presence through shaped skylights and facade perforations — and the idea that this might be useful for top-down organizations that require “unwavering belief among members.” It is noted that objects can be deliberately designed to be almost irresistibly desirable, that this can be dangerous, and that it’s important to “know the shapes to look for,” especially those that are soft with a hard edge and bearing intentional imperfections; as to function, “whoever markets it will know.” Sokolow frets, too, about the trustworthiness of mycelium-based building materials, asking if the walls will be “mushy,” how they might affect human behavior, and what to do about “the limited range of tans and creams,” as well as “uncomfortable levels of mouth feel.”
If some of this sounds like it might be more aptly explored through a scholarly article in a peer-reviewed journal, it may have been! The artist is not shy about her research and, indeed, both the gallery press release and individual drawings make passing mention of references, from Madame Blavatsky to Kenneth Frampton, from Freud to the novel Mexican Gothic. This is not to say that Sokolow’s artworks are factually correct, despite the undeniably rational thrust of their diagrammatic presentation and impassive textual amendments. Who would dare to argue with an architect’s drawings? And who in their right mind wants to get involved with a conspiracy theorist?
That’s the thing about Deb Sokolow’s drawings. They are as wackadoodle as they are truthful. Hence that Kermit the Frog business, mentioned above. The drawings in question, which obviously include panels in many shades of green, diagram the relationship between Muppets and emotional pathos. From there, it’s not such a far leap to the aesthetics of the “wellness zones” on corporate campuses.
So have a good laugh, maybe even a snort, while also thinking, gosh, some seriously questionable stuff is going on behind the scenes in the design and architecture programs of governments and corporations. As Sokolow warns in “Visualizing a Subtle, Soothing Environment for Body Work”: “Everything is engineered to appear without an agenda. But there’s always an agenda.”
Deb Sokolow: Visualizing continues at Western Exhibitions (1709 West Chicago Avenue, Chicago, Illinois) through December 16. The exhibition was organized by the gallery.
