Aspen Art Museum

On encountering the work of Kathrin Sonntag, one quickly learns that things are usually not quite how they first appear, and that one thing is usually connected to something else. Encompassing photography, film, sculpture, and installation, Sonntag’s practice reveals an uncanny world of odd angles, unexpected likenesses, and visual puns. Through the use of trompe l’oeil photographic wallpaper and objects both sculptural and quotidian, Sonntag transposes the space of the studio and of the photograph into that of the gallery. As objects and images are doubled and reflected back upon one another through processes of mimicry and substitution, architectural space and photographic space begin to blend into one another, and visual rhymes and echoes create links between otherwise unrelated objects.

Sonntag invites us to question what and how we see, to consider how our perception is both culturally conditioned and yet always in flux, somehow both predictable and subject to chance. Sonntag plays with our perceptions, but she also provides us with the information to revisit and revise—and ultimately to take pleasure in—those initial moments of misrecognition.