Conduit Gallery presents "For as Long as I Live, I Will Sing My Song," the sixth solo exhibition for Anthony Sonnenberg at the gallery.The Texas-born, Fayetteville-based artist’s latest exhibition asserts Sonnenberg’s ongoing research into queerness, perception and power and through a lens of Decoration and beauty.
With an educational background in Art History, Sonnenberg mines societal and artistic movements to build bodies of sculptural work, installation, photography, video, performance and wearable art all with Decoration at its center. For Sonnenberg, “Decoration makes visible all the innumerable intricate structures of social hierarchy. Decoration provides all the visual contexts that let us know who is favored by our current society and who is not - who is a president, a priest, or a prisoner. However, it is also a double-edged sword that can easily cut both ways. It is the perfect tool to reinforce hierarchies but also the perfect tool to infiltrate or even collapse them.”
Sonnenberg focuses on the areas of decoration on the edges of normal everyday social life, such as objects associated with death and funerary processes or expressions of queer identities. Areas where the rules on how things are meant to work are not so clear, allowing more questions and alternative suggestions.
In "For as Long as I Live, I Will Sing My Song," his ceramic sculptures are “decorative art Frankensteins” found figurines, silk flowers and fringe fired together into a new unified whole. He often refers to his ceramic sculptures as “decoration made of decorations.” A large sculpture, Shield (I know it makes no sense to cry) (2024) is his manifestation of decoration as a tool to project beauty, style and uniqueness, to protect one through the perception of confidence and power. Two crowns and portraits continue his work using the orchid as a symbol for queerness, both in celebration and mourning. All are forms of Decoration’s fantastical ability to change the perception of a thing without having to change the thing itself. In his ongoing advocacy for the underdog, Sonnenberg has built a studio and research-based practice that continues to empower the often overlooked and underappreciated.
The exhibition will remain on display through April 19.
Conduit Gallery presents "For as Long as I Live, I Will Sing My Song," the sixth solo exhibition for Anthony Sonnenberg at the gallery.The Texas-born, Fayetteville-based artist’s latest exhibition asserts Sonnenberg’s ongoing research into queerness, perception and power and through a lens of Decoration and beauty.
With an educational background in Art History, Sonnenberg mines societal and artistic movements to build bodies of sculptural work, installation, photography, video, performance and wearable art all with Decoration at its center. For Sonnenberg, “Decoration makes visible all the innumerable intricate structures of social hierarchy. Decoration provides all the visual contexts that let us know who is favored by our current society and who is not - who is a president, a priest, or a prisoner. However, it is also a double-edged sword that can easily cut both ways. It is the perfect tool to reinforce hierarchies but also the perfect tool to infiltrate or even collapse them.”
Sonnenberg focuses on the areas of decoration on the edges of normal everyday social life, such as objects associated with death and funerary processes or expressions of queer identities. Areas where the rules on how things are meant to work are not so clear, allowing more questions and alternative suggestions.
In "For as Long as I Live, I Will Sing My Song," his ceramic sculptures are “decorative art Frankensteins” found figurines, silk flowers and fringe fired together into a new unified whole. He often refers to his ceramic sculptures as “decoration made of decorations.” A large sculpture, Shield (I know it makes no sense to cry) (2024) is his manifestation of decoration as a tool to project beauty, style and uniqueness, to protect one through the perception of confidence and power. Two crowns and portraits continue his work using the orchid as a symbol for queerness, both in celebration and mourning. All are forms of Decoration’s fantastical ability to change the perception of a thing without having to change the thing itself. In his ongoing advocacy for the underdog, Sonnenberg has built a studio and research-based practice that continues to empower the often overlooked and underappreciated.
The exhibition will remain on display through April 19.
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Admission is free.
