Profiles in Leadership // Drawings without words

The installation, viewed as a whole, feels like information - somebody's information; like private plans, maps or diagrams put up for private reference. Engaged individually, though, they're different. One on one, they present themselves. Aesthetic choices overtake informational elements, and they propose something to be deciphered. They describe architecture, floor plans, or some kind of diagram, but what they are and what they depict are both fascinatingly unclear. This push and pull and uncertainty about what it is you are looking at defines the experience and serves as an apt context for bits of text which read in such a way that parallels that context almost exactly. The text strives to inform you in bits and pieces, but what these are fragments of, who is speaking, and what is going on remains mysterious. Ultimately, Sokolow places the viewer in a position to peer into an alternate world with a sense of urgency and excitement about what we can't quite see and what we can't quite understand. All of which, incredibly, serves as a set up for works that turn out to be really very, very funny.

Sokolow takes a tremendous risk in being funny. Her humor arises indirectly from the earnest observations of an anonymous narrator in the text, reporting on alternate reality which finds and crosses the once fine lines between reality and absurdity. The nature of her humor feels very precarious. It feels like, if the anonymous narrator ever betrayed its own identity in the wrong way - if the narrator made a comment or expression which characterized itself with a bad joke, that folly could not only undermined the work in which it occurs, but in a sense, could unmask the narrator in a way that could have a detrimental impact on the entire body of work. Sokolow never makes this sort of error though. Consistently, her humor which is fascinatingly clever, remains a voice whose identity and character is just out of reach from our evaluation.

Profiles in Leadership and Drawings Without Words are two distinct bodies of work exhibited in Western Exhibitions primary and secondary exhibition spaces, respectively. In themselves, each are compelling projects. Considered abstract of this particular moment in history in which they were made (as arguably, they may or should be). They are strong work: compelling progression for her ideas and worthy contributions to her oeuvre.

However, in this present moment in history, that fine line between absurdity and reality which her humor straddles has dissolved in the real world, especially in the specific dynamics of society about which her work has been concerned. Many of Sokolow’s core themes such as the absurdity of masculinity, male power, and the blundering or bizarre behavior of world leaders (particularly male world leaders) are thoroughly and bewilderingly beyond parody in 2019.

Sokolow once brilliantly imagined a bizarre world in which cult leader Jim Jones ran for office and employed David Copperfield to run his campaign. At the time, it was an insightful absurdity. Today, I can no longer feel confident even describing the idea as implausible. Somehow, we've lost a degree of innocence and wonder in our consideration of the reality of power, and the real truth about the world Sokolow once endeavor to hint at has unveiled itself before us.

Just a few years ago, when Sokolow was making works that responded to things, like the lore of the Denver airport conspiracy theories, had an entirely different role in american culture. Suspecting that there were powerful agents operating in the shadows and big secrets that were kept used to be a more universal experience. “I want to believe” we’d muse; The X-files, Coast to Coast AM, even Infowars could appeal to something in our humanity that was broader than politics. A universal distrust that was abstract enough that it felt safe to allow it to inspire the imagination. Sokolow’s handling of that cultural phenomenon explored its boundaries and found insight in stretching its limits. Introducing David Copperfield, for example, into that discourse worked specifically because it illuminated the role of wonder and magic in those mysteries of power. It was an angle that proposed the inclusion of something well understood to be fiction, inviting the viewer to suspend disbelief to explore deeper where these threads may lead. Sokolow understood that this was an important platform for popular curiosity - do aliens exist? Is magic real? Are there hidden treasures? Is there a big supernatural secret that we just aren't allowed to see? Can there still be unexplained things?

Today, things have changed. Sokolow's investigations of the boundaries of that realm of thought has been left far behind by the Surkovian tactics which have stolen distrust and speculation of conspiracies from us and weaponized them for propaganda around the world. The misinformation campaigns and their social media machines have brought about cults of conspiracy believers who obliterate illusions we once held of any basic consensus that existed about what's real and what isn't. The imagined world Sokolow's diagrams described which were once planly beyond what could be believed, do not begin to approach the absurdity described, for example, by today's “q-anon” diagrams which untold numbers of people believe in their hearts describes the only real truth in the world. The Q Clock, for example, an unbelievably convoluted “proof” that an anonymous official in the highest levels of the Trump administration (potentially Trump himself) is actually also a time traveler, is gospel to an influential portion of the American population.

As conspiracy theories become more outlandish, more prevalent and influential than they have ever been, they also become profoundly more hateful, racist and divisive. Alex Jones used to rant and rave about the “New World Order” ancient secret societies, the Illuminati or fluoride in our water - now he sells pills that promise to protect against diseases carried across the border by immigrants, and it's just not funny anymore.

So what has Sokolow done? First, in profiles in leadership, she looks backwards and outwards. Works that reference Richard Nixon, or architecture are almost nostalgic - and a strong, lovely and clever as ever. Then, in the next gallery space, drawings without words turns its back on all of this in a way that seems to acknowledge something deeply sad.

In Drawings Without Words, Sokolow asks us to consider her work differently, the visual aspects of them alone - her drawings abstract of everything else. It's a compelling idea, for an artist who has so well established a body of work which has two distinct parts, to remove the more prominent and leave us to only see the aspect that has resided in a sort of background. The idea that the drawings are something like floor plans, diagrams, or architecture is carried over from her narrative work, but here, the idea that they are also not any of those things is a new proposition that turns out to be very endearing. Without speaking, these works maintain a sense of mytery, history, and work. I want to take her up on that proposition. I want to appreciate their quiet, purely aesthetic nature, but I can't help feeling that their silence is troubling...