VONZWECK announces

Don’t worry, everything will be fine (part 2)

by Deb Sokolow

Opening Reception Thursday March 6, 2007 6-9pm
Open Thursdays in March            
Or by appointment

For VONZWECK, Deb Sokolow has created a new suite of drawings based on the 1992 Washington Post article, “The Ultimate Congressional Hideaway.” When originally published, the article exposed and caused the decommissioning of a large, secret bunker that had been built for Congress members beneath the posh Greenbrier Resort in West Virginia between 1959-1962. Until the revelation of its existence, the bunker was quietly maintained for decades by government agents who would pose as television repairmen at the resort. Sokolow recounts and illustrates the story from the perspective of a nameless, paranoid narrator who leaves no stone unturned when weighing in on the facts and in asking the question, “If Greenbrier can no longer be used, where will Congress now hide when the shit hits the fan?”

Deb Sokolow, a California native and the granddaughter of a Chicago bookie, developed a curiosity for the city and its nefarious nature in her formative years. Also, at a young age, Sokolow was introduced to the vast universe of politics and intrigue while witnessing a suspicious briefcase exchange in a Washington, D.C. McDonald’s fast food restaurant in 1986 and while working as a congressional intern on Capitol Hill in 1991. A decade later, these interests would surface as subject matter for the paranoid, diagrammatic drawings she would begin to make as a graduate student at the School of the Art Institute in Chicago. These days, Sokolow continues to live and make art in Chicago, but spends the majority of her time investigating the dark, gritty recesses of urban life, reading about the exploits of drug lords, and speculating on various conspiracy theories concerning individuals and occurrences within the world’s political landscape.

Deb Sokolow has had solo exhibitions in 2008 at the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art in Kansas City and at Inova [Institute of Visual Arts] in Milwaukee. In 2005, she created a 48 foot-long drawing, “Someone tell Mayor Daley, the pirates are coming” for a 12x12 solo exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago. Sokolow has also shown in Chicago at 40000, Polvo, Hyde Park Art Center, and 3Arts Club, in San Francisco at Aftermodern, in Houston at Rudolph Projects, and at Northern Illinois University Art Museum. Sokolow received her MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2004 and her BFA from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1996. She is a 2005 recipient of the Visual Arts Fellowship from the Illinois Arts Council. Her work is in the permanent collection of the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago and in the Joan Flasch Artists’ Book Collection.

Link to Washington Post article
Link to Deb Sokolow website