Sonja Braas

“The Quiet of Dissolution”
10.2. – 7.4.2007

The gallery fiedler contemporary opens its first exhibition of this year on Friday, 9 February 2007, with new photography by the New York-based artist Sonja Braas (*1968). As in her previous series “You are here”, 2001, and “Forces”, 2003, the artist deals with the presentation and perception of nature.
Whereas her earlier works show or simulate a romantic idyll, in her latest group of works nature gains its own dynamic. Natural processes culminate in catastrophe: an all-destructive lava stream, a dangerous whirlwind, forest fires or black oil slicks. These are natural catastrophes, which are becoming visible everywhere through global communication and media images.
The intention of Sonja Braas’ photography is a different way of dealing with – and looking at – natural catastrophes. Using a similar strategy to her earlier work, she initially lets the viewer fall into a trap, drawn in by the overwhelming presence of her pictures. The forcefully sublime situations are photographed in extreme close-up, almost as if the camera were right in the middle of them. Sonja Braas makes the power and the energy expressed in these untamed acts of nature visible and almost audible.   
Yet at the very point at which the extreme intensity of the act of nature emerges, the question of the pictures’ authenticity arises. Subtle hints and picturesque elements indicate that some of the content is simulated. The promise of a ‘true catastrophe’ remains unfulfilled. The authentic appears untrue, but the reconstruction in its ‘aesthetic composition’ seems perhaps better and more captivating than the original.
In contrast to first suspicions, the photographs are not produced by computer manipulation, but by means of large-format models made by the artist for this sole purpose. Sonja Braas spends months in her studio, working on their dramaturgy down to the tiniest detail.
The motifs of “The Quiet of Dissolution” cannot be precisely located in time and place, and have the effect of allegories, of petrified moments of the unpredictable, the sudden and overwhelming – like nature in its compacted form. More, they succeed in describing the emotional state in which we find ourselves when looking at a natural catastrophe: we are captivated by what we see and ‘hold our breath’.   
Sonja Braas was born in Siegen/Germany in 1968. She studied Visual Communication, Photo and Film Design at the University of Applied Science in Dortmund and the School of Visual Arts in New York. She has lived and worked in New York since 1997.