Posted: April 14, 2022

A solo exhibition by artist Sommer Roman featuring sculpture and works on paper

Sommer Roman is a multi-disciplinary artist who uses discarded clothing and linens, nature objects, feathers, fur, mirrors, toilet paper, and domestic building materials to create works imbedded with themes of the everyday life, domesticity, the body, and the wild. The larger question that drives her making is “How do we know ourselves and understand the human experience in relation to the domestic & natural worlds around us?
In this new body of work, Roman plays with Descartes’ famous words, “I think, therefore I am," by using the locus of the head as a starting point to question this site as the quintessential source of intellect & knowledge, and consequently a rationale to seeing ourselves as above and apart from that which is non-human. To counter, she offers playful, biomorphic, and tactile forms interwoven with elements of body, nature, home, & beast, to implicate a multitude of sources for knowledge, self-understanding, and enlightenment.

Inspired by what biologist & philosopher Andreas Weber calls a “Poetic Ecology,” this is an artistic exploration of an idiosyncratic ecosystem that follows a new logic that “restores the human to its rightful place within “nature”—  without sacrificing the otherness, the strangeness and the nobility of other beings.”  Rather, it aims to collapse the old orders where humans are superior, and instead braids us (humans) back into rightful kinship and interconnectedness with all of life. 

Sommer’s work aims to evoke a sense of wonder about life and our relationship to “other”…and furthermore, recalls the essential mutuality between plant, animal, and human that is core to our aliveness.

Featuring works by Sommer Roman https://www.sommerroman.com/

February 9th 2021 - April 1st 2022

OPENING RECEPTION: February 9, 4:30–7:30pm

ARTIST TALK: March 10, 5:30 pm in The Humanities Forum, Building 6300, or online at bit.ly/noblesamongus

WORKSHOP: Sommer Roman Round Table Discussion and Paper Clay Workshop March 17, 11:00am-1:00pm in the Fine Arts Courtyard Workshop Handout    

Press Release

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