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DEB SOKOLOW | press

2011

Phoenix New-Times. Peterson, Sativa. "SMoCA's Latest Exhibit Gives Glimpse Into the Lives of Its Artists"
Thursday, Dec 15 2011
Arizona Republic. Nilsen, Richard. "3 exhibits illustrate new vigor at SMoCA”. November 26, 2011
ARTnews. Miranda, Carolina. "Comic Relief" (Deb Sokolow). October 11, 2011.
WBEZ. Amer, Robin. "Artist Deb Sokolow makes conspiracy theories come alive in graphic style". October 6, 2011.
Artforum.com. Droitcour, Brian. “Deb Sokolow”. August 8, 2011
Accordion Publications. Perkins, Stephen. "Deb Sokolow accordion books." December 6, 2011
Daily Serving. Spurgeon, Marta ."Skip the Trip to the Library: People Don’t Like to Read Art at Western Exhibitions, Chicago". July 26, 2011
ArtSlant. Ritchie, Abraham. "Read the Fine Print". July 11, 2011
Chicago Tribune. Waxman, Lori. "An alternative summer reading list" July 13, 2011
Paletten. Lind, Maria (Guest Editor). Cover image and 4-page spread: Deb Sokolow, April 2011
Art 21. Picard, Caroline. “Caution, You Are Being Watched” (interview). January 13, 2011
Kinsgstitt Tumblr. Bertran, Britton. “2010 Top 10”, January 2011
A Pragmatic Liberal Yid. Hunter, Scott. “My "best of" list ... Chicago art 2010”. January, 2, 2011
Chicago Art Review. Ruiz, Steve. "Deb Sokolow" (review). January 3, 2011

2010

Artforum.com. Droitcour, Brian. “Deb Sokolow”. August 8, 2011
Daily Serving. Spurgeon, Marta ."Skip the Trip to the Library: People Don’t Like to Read Art at Western Exhibitions, Chicago". July 26, 2011
ArtSlant. Ritchie, Abraham. "Read the Fine Print". July 11, 2011
Chicago Tribune. Waxman, Lori. "An alternative summer reading list" July 13, 2011
Paletten. Lind, Maria (Guest Editor). Cover image and 4-page spread: Deb Sokolow, April 2011
Chicago Art Review. Ruiz, Steve. "Deb Sokolow" (review). January 3, 2011
Art 21. Picard, Caroline. “Caution, You Are Being Watched” (interview). January 13, 2011
Kinsgstitt Tumblr. Bertran, Britton. “2010 Top 10”, January 2011
A Pragmatic Liberal Yid. Hunter, Scott. “My "best of" list ... Chicago art 2010”. January, 2, 2011
Artforum.com. Ise, Claudine. "Deb Sokolow". December 15, 2010
Chicago Tribune. Viera. Lauren. "Best of Galleries 2010" (Miller & Shellabarger, Rachel Niffenegger, Deb Sokolow). December 17, 20
Clarendon Patch. Carothers, Sara. “Comics Crash the Party at the Artisphere and AAC”. December 12, 2010
Chicago Tribune. Waxman, Lori. “Deb Sokolow” (review). December 10, 2010
Time Out Chicago. Weinberg, Lauren. “Deb Sokolow” (review). December 9, 2010
New City. Golden-McNerney, Regan. “Deb Sokolow” (review). December 6, 2010
ArtSlant. Ritchie, Abraham. “Do I want to Believe?” (review). November 22, 2010
Huffington Post. Klein, Paul. “Text Matters”, November 19, 2010
Flavorpill. Smigasiewicz, Beatrice. “Editor's Pick: Deb Sokolow”, November 19, 2010
The Open Daybook. Earle, David. Mark Batty Publisher. November 2010
Location: Volume Three. Minneapolis, MN
ArtSlant. Ritchie, Abraham. “The Slant on Deb Sokolow”. (interview). September 2010
Jettison Quarterly. Carter, Kristen. “Making Sense of Our Paranoia with Deb Sokolow.” (Interview) Issue Number 6, Summer 2010
Art in America (online). Oh, Janet. "Production Site” (Review). May 25
Chicago Tribune. Waxman, Lori. “A look inside the artist's studio”. (Review). May 7
Flavorwire. Lund, Karsten. “Daily Dose Pick: Deb Sokolow” (Profile)
Artforum.com. Ise, Claudine. “Production Site: The Artist's Studio …”. (Review). March 11
fNews. Stoepel, Whitney. “Studios on Display”. (review). March 4th
Artnet. Velez, Pedro. “Chicago Build Up” (Review)
Time Out Chicago. Weinberg, Lauren. “Production Site: The Artist’s Studio Inside-Out” (Review)
Gaper’s Block. Lendman, John. “Inside the Artist's Studio at the MCA” (Review)
New City. Foumberg, Jason. “Review: Production Site: The Artist’s Studio Inside Out” (Review)

2009

New City. Foumberg, Jason. Top 5 Best Drawing Shows of 2009”. December 28, 2009
Artforum.com. Ise, Claudine. “Critics’ Picks: Heartland” (Review)
Chicago Tribune. Viera, Lauren. “Artist Deb Sokolow, revealed.”
Dagens Nyheter. Lind, Maria. “Hjärtpunkten Chicago [At the Heart of Chicago]” (Review)
Chicago Art Review. Ruiz, Steve. “Heartland @ The Smart Museum of Art” (Review)
Chicago Tribune. Viera, Lauren. “Gallery winners from Sokolow, Harrison” (Review)
Beautifuldecay.com. “Deb Sokolow” (Interview)
Artslant. Gunn, Dan. “Reassessing MiddleCoast Art” (Review)
Timeout Chicago. Weinberg, Lauren. “Heartland” (Review)
Badatsports. “Episode 201: Deb Sokolow” (Interview)
Chicago Tribune. Viera, Lauren. “More Brilliance from Deb Sokolow” (Review), May 29, 2009
New City. Calder, Jaime. “Review: Deb Sokolow/Spertus Museum” (Review)
Chicago Tribune. Viera, Lauren. “Artist Deb Sokolow, revealed” (Review)
New City. Foumberg, Jason. “Eye Exam: Smartland” (Review)
Proximity Magazine. “Deb Sokolow Studio View” Issue #2.
Daily Serving. “Spertus Museum announces Ground Level Projects”, January 2009

2008

Chicago Tribune. Viera, Lauren. “Ones to watch” (Profile)
Modern Art Notes. Green. Tyler. “Weekend Roundup”, March 19, 2008
Kansas City Star. Thorson, Alice. “Kemper mystery exhibit is a you-dunit” (Review)

Chicago artist Deb Sokolow describes her elaborate wall drawing at the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art as “one big cliché of a mystery detective story.” But Sokolow’s story, titled “You Are One Step Closer to Learning the Truth,” is far more ambitious than your average whodunit. For starters, it covers all four walls of the museum’s meeting room.

Threaded with social commentary, existential angst, wry reflections on human behavior and a playful sense of the absurd, her energetic outpouring of hand-painted images and hand-printed texts offers a grand psycho-romp through American culture — with Kansas City as a staging area and the reader as protagonist. “You are about to read a story,” states the opening line of text. “You are the main character.” That character is a hapless detective who receives a note from a woman named Mrs. Vincheslaus requesting help in finding her missing husband.

Dr. Vincheslaus is a “hermetic chemist” in the process of inventing a special KC-style barbecue sauce “with youth-enhancing results.” A bit of detection, involving the requisite questions about his appearance and possible enemies (as well as his favorite foods and colors), yields the conclusion that the doctor has managed to find the mythic fountain of youth and that to find him, the detective must find the fountain.

Nothing about this story is straightforward. For one thing, Sokolow constantly appends the main narrative with little tongue-in-cheek asides from the detective’s kvetching alter-ego. “You’re in control of the story,” the artist informs the reader at the outset. And then the little alter ego weighs in: “Wouldn’t it be nice to be in control of something just once?” “But who are you?” the artist continues. “Sometimes you’re not really sure who you are,” the inner voice observes with a hint of smugness.

The texts are enlivened throughout by visual accompaniments, including a bar graph assessing detective skills ranging from “The Best in the Field” to “As Good as Columbo.” An illustration of the spooky-looking exterior of the Vincheslaus house is followed by a Clue-style diagram of the interior.
Moving from one wall to the next, Sokolow cleverly incorporates the meeting room’s utilitarian features — a surveillance camera, a pair of emergency doors — into the story. Shortly after the narrative gets going, it splits, inspired by the popular “Choose Your Own Adventure” series of children’s books that offer readers optional story lines.

In Sokolow’s tale, the story divides when the reader/detective must decide whether the fountain of youth is more likely to be found in Portland, Ore., or Kansas City. Much of the fun of the story derives from its inclusion of familiar Kansas City locales, including the Raphael Hotel, Halls department store and Oklahoma Joe’s.
The worlds of pop culture and celebrity surface through appearances by Robert De Niro — cast in the role of a suspicious character who crops up at various points in the story — and David Copperfield, whom the narrative exposes as a fraud. At one point, the detective considers what Ted Koppel, Oliver Stone and Nancy Drew would do in his situation.

Things get manic in all three lines of investigation. The Koppel-style inquiry leads to an encounter with a famous food critic. He believes that Dr. Vincheslaus is “adding kooky chemicals to food” that give peopl
e cancer, but worse, make the food taste bad. The Oliver Stone story line takes a delightfully gory turn that explains “Why Kansas City barbecue sauce tastes so good.”

Alternative endings include an adventure in Kansas City’s Subtropolis caves with a reference to the museum’s recent acquisition of a 2006 painting of the site by Lisa Sanditz. Through all these twists and turns, the narrator’s paranoia is a source of great amusement. Yet considered as a parallel reality to our own, the story’s not so funny. In a media-saturated world where the lines between truth and fiction are often blurred, a little paranoia may be a sign of sanity.

Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. Schumacher, Mary Louise. “Miranda July meets Mark Lombardi” (Review)

Like the Choose Your Own Adventure children's books, Deb Sokolow's installation at Inova, "The Trouble with People You Don't Know," puts us into the role of the protagonist and invites us to make choices that determine how a plot unfolds.

Instead of turning pages, though, we follow arrows around the room. We walk ahead, turn a corner or linger in order to make choices in this story about the internal workplace dramas of a giant bookstore chain where we are a self-conscious staffer with a love of art books and Nancy Drew.

Will we fill out the application for the better paying, $22,000-a-year job? Will we go home and practice re-shelving books? Will we out our colleague who has just got to be dealing meth? Will we indulge our curiosity about the history of epidemics?

Setting the pace and direction of the story, driven by text and fashioned from basic "office" materials, like notebook paper and cardboard, is a bit like slipping down one of the Internet's many rabbit holes or like a spontaneous unfolding of the imagination. Except, we are not so in control.

The odd, fictional inner voice that drives the piece is Chicago-based Sokolow's creation. The uninhibited, paranoia-infused, sometimes obsessive and precise self-talk we're given, on loan, is a strange cross between performance artist-filmmaker Miranda July and the late, brilliant, conspiracy theorist-artist Mark Lombardi.

Inner arguments, printed out carefully in black and red pencil, become convincingly our own because they're open to interpretation. That they're also suggestive of an odd and distracted mind is something we put up with because the journey is so entertaining, because we want to know what'll happen next.

As we experience this fictional inner voice in tandem with our own, reacting to it, the artwork maps out something about our own habits of mind, about our distractedness, about our entertainment appetites and about how we navigate the layers of media, information and experience that are part of our lives.

Sokolow's piece is part of a larger exhibit of drawings curated by Nicholas Frank. Outside of the Milwaukee Art Museum, Frank does what few other curators do here: He explores a larger art world trend, namely large-scale drawing, through a specific strain within it, in this case drawings with a narrative aspect.

Express Milwaukee. Motlani. Aisha. “Pictorial Paranoia” (Review)

In The Trouble With People You Don’t Know, Deb Sokolow constructs an imaginary persona whose decisions the viewer has the power to direct. Pinned to the wall are a series of hastily scribbled drawings and notes, resembling an obsessive crime investigator’s cache of maps and photos, and outlining the range of possibilities open to this fictional character.

We read the pros and cons of each, commentary riddled with irony and selfdoubt, as we grope along the walls to divine the outcome of our choices. Dominic McGill’s Orchestra of Fear consists of a tent inscribed with livid headlines, epithets and irreverent caricatures. They look like the obsessive scrawlings of a madman, a media harlot and a keen social critic all rolled into one. Most unsettling is its air of disrepute. It resembles the kind of ominous abode that fairy-tale protagonists are cautioned to avoid but to which they’re irresistibly drawn. There’s even a drawing of a wolf in sheep’s clothing—or rather scout’s clothing—to strengthen this impression.

Yet Sokolow and McGill both place a curious distance between themselves and the persona around whom their work revolves. It’s not Sokolow’s thoughts we’re sharing in her piece, but those of a stranger racked by doubts and hopes which are no less crippling for being rather ordinary. The tent McGill constructs belongs not to him but to an imaginary recluse dwelling on the social periphery, out of sight but not out of mind.

Vital Source. Moriarty, Judith Ann. “Drawing Conclusions” (Review)
Elms, Anthony. Exhibition Essay for The trouble with people you don’t know
Timeout Chicago. Mojica, Jason. “Mapping the Self” (Review)
The Lost Review. Velez, Pedro. “Alive and Kicking in Chicago” (Profile)

2007

Artnet. Orden, Abraham. (Review), January 24, 2007
Chicago Magazine. Topor, Joanna. “After Paschke” (Profile)

2006

Art Papers. Elms, Anthony. “Deb Sokolow” (Review)
Chicago Sun-Times. Nance, Kevin. “On paper, MCA show is a smash” (Review)

Equally obsessive and absorbing, if with a decidedly lighter touch, is Deb Sokolow's "Someone Tell Mayor Daley, the Pirates Are Coming," which was seen last year at MCA as part of the museum's increasingly invaluable 12 x 12 series featuring younger local artists. This nervy piece, another super-wide scroll (this one marked up in ink, graphite and corrective fluid), is a high-concept hoot -- the first work of art to make me laugh out loud since Aernout Mik's "Refraction" video at MCA last year.

Sokolow's elaborate story line is that of a conspiracy theorist convinced that a band of pirates is coming to infiltrate and eventually plunder the Windy City. We're not talking about corporate raiders here; we're talking about the real thing, bloodthirsty vulgarians with eyepatches, peg legs and scraggly beards. (Think Johnny Depp.) They're digging tunnels, infiltrating the power structure, setting up meth labs (meth labs?), all in preparation for the day they appear in their warships on Lake Michigan.

What would Ted Koppel do? So the narrator wonders, before finally deciding to warn Mayor Daley -- but wait! What treasure is it, really, that the pirates are after? What if the first Mayor Daley secretly buried it on Northerly Island? What if his son tried to recover it by shutting down Meigs Field, guiding the backhoes by marking the spot with a giant X? What if . . .?

Chicago Tribune. Artner, Alan. (Review)
Centerstage Chicago. Hinkel, Joanne. “Deb Sokolow draws Chicago in” (Profile)
New City. Foumberg, Jason. (Profile)

Deb Sokolow, a 32-year-old artist from California who lives and works in Chicago, combines text and image in storyboards that unfold left to right through space. These diagrams chart both a narrator's inner-dialogue and external events that encompass both personal and political fictions. Sokolow began experimenting with flow-charts during her studies in The School of the Art Institute of Chicago's progressive Fiber and Material Studies program. Since graduating in 2004, she has gained widespread attention in many of Chicago's alternative and institutional art venues. Sokolow's art, like a serial pulp novella, has a definite appeal; Chicago viewers just can't seem to get enough. Her exhibition history includes the coveted 12x12 emerging-artist showcase at the MCA and a performance in a Marshall Field's window display.

Bred from her parents' library of political history and popular espionage novels, Sokolow's art is a tangle of myth and reality. Her current work at Gallery 40000, titled "Secrets and Lies and More Lies," presents Sokolow's experience of a ghost sighting at the Winchester Mystery House in San Jose, California. The plot unfolds to include a possible terrorist scheme told through trifling details about the narrator. This narrator in Sokolow's drama--who is a consistent character in all her projects--is a bored and disaffected corporate-world peon who is officially in charge of ordering office supplies and unofficially in charge of guarding those supplies from theft. Such paranoiac tendencies breed further anxieties about the world at large. The narrator's voice is a reflection of insecurities about mediocrity, manifesting itself as a schizoid internal dialogue, an excessive use of correction fluid, the inequities of local politics, even a spooky house.

The narrator is only called "You," as in you, the viewer. "You" daydream yourself out of the city of cubicles and into a labyrinthine story of secret operations. The monotony and alienation of office life is transcended through a narrative that results in investigations into the bureaucracy of social relations in the information age. Fantasy spawns truth; whether personal truths or capital "T" Truth--both are the compound result of the humor and the horror of self-consciousness.

2005

Chicago Tribune. Artner, Alan. “Putting post-9/11 fear on the map: Sokolow’s dark vision at the MCA” (Review)

Deb Sokolow's immense new drawing at the Museum of Contemporary Art has the title "Someone Tell Mayor Daley, the Pirates are Coming," and not least because the artist staged a live-action version in a store window on State Street, there is the temptation to take it as James M. Barrie-like whimsy.

But the piece, which crosses various diagrams with a treasure map, is a good deal darker than that, thanks to its central character, a sleepless paranoiac whom Sokolow gives a soliloquy that nicely establishes a tone of post-9/11 hysteria.

The character's stream of consciousness unfolds on a single bluish sheet that covers parts of three walls in a gallery. Sokolow prints in various colors, illustrating aspects of the narrative while driving viewers along with dotted lines and arrows. An apparent street person sets everything in motion by screaming something that the narrator fantastically embellishes into an open-ended saga of old and new Chicago.

The wonder of it is less the quality of Sokolow's drawing than her effectiveness in creating a character and sustaining tension. Just like horror films transform fears that are already in the culture, so does this piece take our uneasiness about terrorism and recast it in the terms of a children's storybook that retains a very real urban anxiety.

For much of the last century narrative art was ridiculed. Literature and theater were supposed to tell stories better. Sokolow challenges that, and takes us along with her.

Art on Paper. Hixson, Kathryn. (Review)
Chicago Tribune. Storch, Charles. “Pirates invade Chicago” (Profile)
Chicago Magazine. Wilk, Deborah. “Studio City” (Profile)
Chicago Tribune. Artner, Alan. "…Early Adopters…" (Review)
Punk Planet (Reproduction)

 

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