Sol Kjøk "Merry-Go-Round"

Sol Kjøk "Merry-Go-Round" 2024

Painting, Oil, acrylics and crayons on wood panel
Dimensions: 48 x 36 inches
Unique
Signed on panel edge

Sol Kjøk is a Norwegian-born New York–based painter and arts community builder. She is the founder and captain of Mothership NYC, a multidisciplinary international artist collective with a residency and presentation space in Brooklyn, and works from Last Frontier NYC, her warehouse studio and performance venue.

Kjøk left Norway as a teenager and studied in Paris, Athens, Vienna, Medellín, and Cincinnati, earning three graduate degrees in the humanities before receiving her MFA in Painting from Parsons School of Design in New York. An avid lifelong drawer, her work has been featured in more than 100 exhibitions worldwide, with her performance-based artwork included in Drawing Essentials, published by Oxford University Press. She has received more than 50 awards and artist grants, held residencies internationally, and taught and lectured at universities, museums, and art centers throughout the United States.

Her work is held in public collections including the Cincinnati Art Museum, Teckningsmuseet i Laholm in Sweden, Shaanxi Province Art Museum in Xi’an, China, and the Osten Museum of Drawing in Skopje, Macedonia, as well as numerous private and corporate collections worldwide.

Artist Statement

Sound Shapes' Series

"Spurred by the monthly sound healing sessions set in the tepee in my studio, 'Sound Shapes' is an interdisciplinary collaboration between three artists from our Brooklyn-based, international artist collective Mothership NYC. Together with a composer and a sound healer, I am exploring how sound orchestrates the dance of energy and matter as the catalyst of creation and perpetual transmutation. This ongoing experimental project encompasses painting, sacred geometry, digital projections, experimental music, improvised action, and sound healing.

My tangles of figures suspended in space are visualizations of a worldview informed by quantum physics, Eastern philosophy, and intuitive insights: for all its perceived solidity, the material world is nothing but an intricate dance of vibrations. For the 'Sound Shapes' paintings, I am specifically drawing on hands-on experimentation with Cymatics, the field of study that examines the graphic representation of sounds. Appearing in physical mediums such as sand or water, cymatics patterns are the manifestations of the vibrational energy that generated them: circular, harmonious forms found throughout nature —e.g. in snowflakes, seashells, spiderwebs, and the intricate shapes of flowers—as well as in human-made designs such as mandalas and rose windows. The very same patterns appear to our inner eye during psychedelic experiences. Indeed, cymatics may be evidence of the universal interconnectivity of all things." - Sol Kjøk