You are one step closer to learning the truth

Deb Sokolow
You are one step closer to learning the truth (detail)
Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, Kansas City
141 foot-long drawing inked onto the walls
on view until June 14, 2008

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.

Excerpt from the Vonzweck Gallery exhibition, March 2008