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| Biography By the age of ten, Audrey Sochor had already begun a career as a textile installation artist. In the summers, she would build a playhouse in a copse of trees by putting stones on the ground to mark the rooms, then hang old lace curtains from her mother’s rag bag to mark the walls. Curtains were to peek through without being seen. Curtains were to hide behind to eaves-drop on the world. Curtains were to make a space that seemed to stretch to the sky. From high school through the University, every time she had an elective course, Sochor was in textile classes learning more about what she could create with cloth. In UC Berkeley Graduate painting classes when Abstract Expressionism and the San Francisco School were still in vogue, to her the canvas ground was as important as the paint. She stained in oils on canvas leaving the ground to be an integral part of the painting. Her work was shown in San Francisco commercial galleries. The only problem was that Helen Frankenthaler had already made the technique her own. Tired of being referenced to Frankenthaler, Sochor went back to her beginnings and began exploring painting with acrylic dyes and inks on cotton and polyester curtain fabrics. But she did not know what to do with them. She found that by painting on two pieces of sheer fabric and layering one over the other brought out the moiré phenomenon where the painting became alive, changing micro secondly as the light and the position of the viewer changed. But what would the subject matter of such a painting be? While she was mulling this over, she opened Sand Dollar Studio and began painting and printing fabrics for clothing and interior designers. She joined fibre artists of the San Francisco Bay Area and showed her work at Richmond Art Center, Oakland Museum, fibre galleries, and Marin and Piedmont Designer Showcases. Chance intervened when her husband went back to graduate school in theatre history at UC Davis. Out of curiosity, Sochor joined a Design for the Stage class. Memories of that playhouse in the trees came back to her. Curtains to peek through without being seen, curtains to hide behind and eaves-drop on the world, curtains that went to the sky. She learned to use lighting and dimmers to effect change in the curtains, to make places for something important to happen. She designed a number of plays. The only problem was, once a play opened, the stage manager took over for the run of the play, and everything stayed the same. She gained the MFA degree, but she wanted to create her own ever-changing world. How was she to do it? In 1991 at the Shakespeare Festival in Ashland, Oregon, she met Dr. Richard and Dianne Hurst of Vancouver, Washington, bearing binders of underwater photographs of their recent dive in Palau. A whole new world opened for Sochor, the wonders of the sea. A life-time problem of motion sickness meant diving was not for her, but she had an artist’s imagination. Now she needed to immerse herself in marine ecology. It was off to the Newport Aquarium and the Monterey Bay Aquarium to study the sea and sea life in action, to local dive shops to talk to divers, and to the library to study ocean science. The sea became her theatre of operations. Humans emerged from the sea eons ago but now are denied reentry by the very nature of their biology. Her job became one of interpretation through installations of her curtains of what it would be like to reenter the sea unencumbered by air tanks. By now, Sochor found there was much she didn’t know about installation art. Her experience had been in painting and theatre. The problem became, how to integrate the two into a new medium, a kind of kinetic art. Sochor had spent a postgraduate year in Europe twenty years before studying art history and remembered with amusement her discovery of the movement artists, Marcel Duchamp and Tinguely, but it was finding Frank Popper’s book, Origins and Development of Kinetic Art, that gave her the history of kinetic art. She also found a film of the work of Venezuelan artist Jesus Rafael Soto using the moiré phenomenon in the visual representation of movement. This set her course to the creation of “Sea Curtains.” Chance intervened again when the printing industry changed from silk screen to computerized mechanical means. Bolts of Swiss and Italian monester and polyester sheer fabrics became available to her for little or nothing just for carrying them away. To her past expertise in painting large canvases and screen printing yards of fabric for interior designers, she now added spray painting which she learned by watching auto painters at work in body repair shops. She found larger studio space, bought an air compressor, and began making doubled fabric paintings nine to ten feet high. As she hung them from the ceiling of her studio she added theatrical lighting and her studio became a living model of a SCUBA dive. Divers commented that in moving among the “Curtains” they had the same feeling of euphoria and unawareness of the passage of time as they encountered in diving, what they referred to as the “Zen” experience. In 1999 she had the first show of “Sea Curtains” at the Grants Pass Museum of Art and in the same year had pieces in the Coos and Bellevue art museums. In each case, dimmers were attached to the lights so the experiences could change the lighting and therefore the action of the art. Viewer comment was that they had experienced a theatre-like event of total immersion in the present moment. They no longer had a sense of the passage of time. They had entered a state of euphoria, a Zen state. In an extensive show at the Rogue Gallery in Medford in 2000 and at the Littman Gallery at Portland State University in 2001 “fishing nets” were added. In 2003 at the Grants Pass Museum of Art, “Jelly Fish” and the first “Tendrils” were included. In 2006 at the Coos Museum of Art, new “Tendrils" were added. The sizes of the galleries have ranged from 500 to 1500 square feet in rectangular, square, and long, narrow spaces, each a fresh and new experience in physical participation for the audience From her beginnings, it has been Sochor’s goal to include the audience as physical participants in the work of art. Her first occupation after graduating from UC Berkeley was teaching children to read and she gained the “Teacher of the Year” award for her unlikely methods of having the children learn through dance, art, myths, poetry, or, as she says, “Whatever works that includes sensory involvement.” She was an avid student of Philosopher and Professor of Aesthetics Stephen Pepper at Berkeley whose whole approach was to find out about and experience the nature of things.
Copyright © 2007 Audrey Sochor
Photography Site Designed by Audrey Sochor
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