March 8 - April 19, 2025
From Conduit Gallery:
“Conduit Gallery is honored to announce For as Long as I Live, I Will Sing My Song, the sixth solo exhibition for Anthony Sonnenberg at Conduit 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, Anthony 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.
Anthony Sonnenberg was born in 1986 in Graham, Texas, and is currently based in Fayetteville, Arkansas. He earned his BA from the University of Texas Austin (2009) and his MFA from the University of Washington Seattle (2012). His work, which ranges from ceramic sculpture to installation and performance, has been shown recently in such art institutions as the Indianapolis Museum of Art (forthcoming, June, 2025); Big Medium, Austin, TX (2024); Rockport Art Center (Rockport, TX); the Windgate Museum of Art, Hendrix College, Conway, AR (2022); Galerie Italienne, Paris, France (2021); Dinner Gallery, New York, NY (2021); Mindy Solomon Gallery, Miami, FL (2021); Gavlak Gallery, Palm Beach, FL (2021); Toledo Museum of Art, Toledo, OH (2020); Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville, AR (2020-current); Contemporary Arts Museum Houston (2019); Fuller Craft Museum, Brockton, MA (2019); Craft Contemporary, Los Angeles, CA (2018) and the Art Museum of Southeast Texas, Beaumont, TX (2019). Residencies include: Township 10 Ceramic Residency, Asheville, NC (2022); the Windgate Museum of Art, Conway, AR (2021); the Inverse Performance Residency, Questa College, San Luis Obisbo, CA (2019); CSULB Summer Studio Resident (2018), Yaddo, Saratoga Springs, NY (2017); the Houston Center for Contemporary Craft, Houston, TX (2016); the Lawndale Artists Studio Program, Houston, TX (2015-16); Sculpture Space, Utica NY (2014); the Archie Bray Foundation for the Ceramic Arts, Helena MT (2014); Pilchuck Glass School, Stanwood WA (2012); and the Ox-Bow School, Saugatuck MI (2017/2008).”
Reception: March 8, 2025 | 5:30–7:30 pm
1626 C Hi Line
Dallas, 75207 TX
(214) 939-0064
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