Sonja Braas
"The Other Day"

Exhibition: 9 June - 5 August, 2022
Opening: Thursday, 9 June, 6-9pm

The images of the series The Other Day (2021) appear to invite the sentimental gaze we have reserved for looking at nature. It is a view born from our comfortable melancholy about the changes nature is undergoing and the nostalgia for better times past. We mourn the loss of our romantic ideals – from sublime, untouched and awe-inspiring nature to the peaceful scenes of pastoral landscapes still celebrating the dominion of mankind over nature.

In the Anthropocene, the epoch in which humans are the primary cause of planetary change, nature void of human impact no longer exists. We are creating both spectacular catastrophes and mundane, ongoing ecological damage, that culminates over time in extreme change. The promise of escapist exits from our lives vanishes, an escape from ourselves, the flight from culture to nature as the Other is no longer an option; wherever we go we are already there.

"Sonja Braas’s photographs transport viewers into ambiguous, evocative, surreal environments. Landscape and nature—wild, tamed, or manufactured—are Braas’s prime subjects, approached in viscerally charged pictures that depict nature as it unfurls in abstracted splendor. Central to Braas’s work is the artist’s self-described interest in "the genesis of perception, its causes and consequences, particularly in the definition of self and Other." She is interested in subtle changes of perception, whether naturally or artificially induced, and, most importantly, in the role that images, and particularly photographs, play. Few artists have been able to capture landscapes with the same elegance, force, precision, and sense of abandonment and create astounding reproductions of untamable, unpredictable, and, therefore, unknowable nature. Braas sees with the eye of a photographer, a sculptor, a painter, an architect, a philosopher." - Diana Edkins

Conspicuous signs of manufacturing are apparent in the images of the series The Other Day - the light that creates uninhabited film sets from mundane suburban landscapes, a detail of a table that holds a desert, the backdrop that is the birch forest’s horizon, or wires that grow off branches carrying brightly colored berries. These disallow nostalgia and acknowledge the anthropogenic origin of the scenes seen. Braas does not create dystopian images though for this series, but gentle, beautiful ones. The disturbance arises from the thorn of dealing with the discovery of human interference, from being asked not to look away.

The series consists of images taken of existing landscapes as well as of sets she builds.

Sonja Braas' (born 1968 in Siegen, Germany) work is part of important collections like the collection of the Brooklyn Museum; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; the Albright Knox Gallery, Buffalo, New York; Philadelphia Museum of Art; Fotomuseum Winterthur, Switzerland; Städtische Galerie Wolfsburg; Collection Hans Grothe, Museum Küppersmühle, Duisburg; DZ Bank; Deutsche Bank; Deutsche Börse AG, EZB, Frankfurt; Münchner Rück, Munch; EON AG, Düsseldorf; Westdeutsche Landesbank, Düsseldorf; Collection Alison & Peter Klein, Eberdingen- Nussdorf, KMS Fine Art Group Private Collections in New York, Paris, London, Berlin, Cologne, Frankfurt, Zurich, Hong Kong, Seoul.