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.