LIGHT SLIP: ARCHIVE, ABSTRACTION, & PHENOMENA

Filter Photo is pleased to present Light Slip: Archive, Abstraction, and Phenomena, a two-person exhibition by Sonja Thomsen and Aaron R. Turner. The works on view explore the boundaries of the photographic image, sculpture, space, geometric abstraction, and history. Thomsen and Turner have been in conversation since 2020, and Light Slip is where that exchange becomes a shared exhibition.

Sonja Thomsen’s interdisciplinary practice places photography at its core, harnessing light as both medium and metaphor. Her work transforms photographic thinking into immersive installations that blur boundaries between image, sculpture, and architecture. Thomsen illuminates the overlooked histories of women photographers, layering these narratives into conversations about image-making, gender, and knowledge production.

Through his series Black Alchemy, Aaron R. Turner constructs images that address abstraction, history, the pictorial aspects of blackness as material, surveillance, and the artist’s role in the studio space, considering past, present, and future at once. His work is grounded in the archive image as a material device, staging scenes with projections, printed matter, cut papers, and photographic apparatus. He often juxtaposes Black historical figures, such as Frederick Douglass, with archival imagery. Through staged manipulations that play heavily with light, Turner obscures and complicates our view of his subjects, resisting graspability while implying an attempt at resurfacing.

Thomsen and Turner have built a space at Filter for viewers to experience their conversation in Light Slip.  A limited edition riso book holds their collaboration, published by Travis Shaffer of theretherenow, launches alongside the exhibition as its own object.

About the Artists

Sonja Thomsen (American, b. 1978) creates luminous installations grounded in the lacunae of photo history, materializing imbalance, collaboration, reverence, and grief through images and sculptures. She choreographs environments that shift with viewers’ movement, transforming exhibition spaces into sites of perceptual discovery. Her work has been exhibited most recently at the High Museum of Art, Atlanta, and internationally at the Bauhaus-Archiv, Berlin, and the Reykjavik Museum of Photography, with work held in the collections of the Art Institute of Chicago, Yale University, the Milwaukee Art Museum, and the MoMA library. She is a recipient of the Ruth Arts Mary L. Nohl Alumni Award and Hermitage Artist Fellowship, and serves as Full Professor, Adjunct in Photography at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

Aaron Turner is an artist, educator, and independent curator based in southeast Michigan. His work centers around photography, archives, geometric abstraction, improvisation, and aesthetic elements of music. In May of 2025, he released his most recent book, The Archive as Liberation, which brings together a dynamic group of artists and writers to engage in dialogue around archival photographic methods. He most recently joined the University of Michigan’s Penny W. Stamps School of Art & Design as an assistant professor.