Artist, curator and video maker Sophia Dixon was born in Baltimore, parked her car for a while in Providence and New York, and now currently resides in Chicago. Her father is novelist Stephen Dixon; her younger sister Antonia is also an artist. Soft-spoken and intense, Sophia is no stranger to thrilling detail, focus and magical feminism. Her favorite color is green, she likes borscht, biscuits, hot chocolate with whipped cream and her favorite animal is the cat. It is not surprising that her favorite books are Nabokov's Ada or Ardor and Charles Burns' graphic novel Black Hole, nor that her favorite films are Holy Mountain, Hiroshima Mon Amour and San Soleil. About books, she has this to say: "The most recent books that I read and recommend are: “The Diary of a Teenage Girl”, by Pheobe Gloeckner, and “The Spiritual Journey of Alejandro Jodorowsky”, by Alejandro Jodorowsky." I forgot to ask her a David Lee Roth question, and I still have a Chekhov book that belongs to her dad.
What do you do? What are you doing the most lately?
I’m an artist. Mostly, I make graphite drawings, and lately I have also been writing very short stories about uncanny everyday events that happen to me, and making videos with my friends Lauren Beck and Ana Nersessian, and my boyfriend, David Cook. Collaboration is a new and wonderful thing for me. I also sometimes curate art shows, like “Glowworms”, which you participated in, back in 2007. For the last year and a half, I have been going to graduate school at the University of Chicago, working towards getting an MFA. It is a very small program, only nine students, and I have been able to take really terrific academic classes in other departments: English, Art History, Gender Studies. It seems that because there are so few of us MFAs, we are able to structure our own educations, and so graduate school has turned out to be primarily a place for me to read and write in ways that I don’t ordinarily.
Triangle Room IIHow long have you done these things? How have the things changed?
I was always a child who drew. I would play drawing games with my sister, Antonia Dixon, who is also an artist, where we would make up a cast of characters and then simultaneously talk through and illustrate their adventures. They would often end up on a cruise ship, where there would be a night of skinny-dipping. Pre-adolescence, I got more into theater, but my parents convinced me to apply to the local arts magnet school for art instead of drama, thinking I’d have a better chance of getting accepted. It was lucky, because I was introverted and socially awkward and I don’t think I would have made much of an actor. I considered myself a painter all the way through college, but after college, my work quickly became almost entirely drawing, first ink, watercolor, and now pencil. In the last couple of years I had been looking for a way to make work that didn’t require a studio, since I’ve had the traveling bug, which is maybe where the impulse to make videos and write stories came from, although I think that that was also a lot about looking for different ways of story-telling.
Why do you do these things? What's it like when you are unable to do these things?
I’m finally coming to terms with the fact that a big part of why I make art is that I am pretty compulsive and need a lot of time alone. It calms me down to lie on the floor, with headphones in my ears, staring at a piece of paper and making repetitive marks that accumulate very, very slowly. Making art also makes me excited and helps me get up in the morning; even though I work slowly, it gives me a thrill not to know how a drawing or video is going to turn out, but to hope that it could, maybe, be something alive and amazing. I have the desire to make other people feel things, and I might also have the desire to make people uncomfortable; I’m not sure about that . When I can’t draw for a while, I start to get restless and unfocused and irritable, and then if it continues too long, I begin to feel empty and wonder why I’m alive.
I was always a child who drew. I would play drawing games with my sister, Antonia Dixon, who is also an artist, where we would make up a cast of characters and then simultaneously talk through and illustrate their adventures. They would often end up on a cruise ship, where there would be a night of skinny-dipping. Pre-adolescence, I got more into theater, but my parents convinced me to apply to the local arts magnet school for art instead of drama, thinking I’d have a better chance of getting accepted. It was lucky, because I was introverted and socially awkward and I don’t think I would have made much of an actor. I considered myself a painter all the way through college, but after college, my work quickly became almost entirely drawing, first ink, watercolor, and now pencil. In the last couple of years I had been looking for a way to make work that didn’t require a studio, since I’ve had the traveling bug, which is maybe where the impulse to make videos and write stories came from, although I think that that was also a lot about looking for different ways of story-telling.
Why do you do these things? What's it like when you are unable to do these things?
I’m finally coming to terms with the fact that a big part of why I make art is that I am pretty compulsive and need a lot of time alone. It calms me down to lie on the floor, with headphones in my ears, staring at a piece of paper and making repetitive marks that accumulate very, very slowly. Making art also makes me excited and helps me get up in the morning; even though I work slowly, it gives me a thrill not to know how a drawing or video is going to turn out, but to hope that it could, maybe, be something alive and amazing. I have the desire to make other people feel things, and I might also have the desire to make people uncomfortable; I’m not sure about that . When I can’t draw for a while, I start to get restless and unfocused and irritable, and then if it continues too long, I begin to feel empty and wonder why I’m alive.
An ImaginingWhen was That Moment in your life that told you would become what you are?
I remember there was a moment in my senior year of high school when I started to like my own artwork for the first time. I think it was when I was making a big painting of my sister reading in a red armchair, surrounded by clothes and junk on the floor and with postcards and photos taped to the walls behind her. It was the first time that I had felt like I was making the art that I wanted to see.
How has your life changed to accommodate That Moment's effect on you?
Up to that point, I had always gotten the most pleasure out of reading, so I had thought that I would go to college to study literature, and then get a PhD and teach at a university, like my mother. When I started to like my own art, that immediately changed, and I began to think of myself as an artist. I think that if I had become an academic, my life would have felt a lot more structured. As an artist, there isn’t a clear path to follow, and the only way to figure out what to do next is to be really open to yourself and to everything around you, which can sometimes be overwhelming. To compensate for this instability, I create structures for myself, and since these generally involve staying home or in my studio and being silent for hours or days, I am no longer the articulate, precocious nerd that I used to be; I’m a different kind of nerd now.
Sophia with Antonia Dixon (left) and Lauren Beck in Maine.Louise Bourgeois said something like, “the blessing and the responsibility of the artist is to stay in touch with their unconscious, like a child”, and this seems true to me. It is a prolonged adolescence, in the sense of continuing to search for my true desire, and having my identity undetermined, always open. I think that’s great. Being an artist means reconsidering what I do all the time, and so I nearly always feel a little unsatisfied with myself, like I haven’t yet actualized what I want, because I don’t yet know quite what that is. It’s like being in psychoanalysis all the time. I’ve started to think of spaceyness as an occupational hazard; I daydream in the middle of conversations and stare blankly into space. And being at the University of Chicago, I’ve become close to really brilliant and creative people studying literature, and realized that I didn’t actually diverge from my original life-idea as much as I had thought. I’m still deep in an esoteric world, obsessing over details, trying to see and show things in a new way.
How does your location affect what you do and who you are these days?
Although my life has changed a lot since moving to Chicago, it has less to do with the city than with being in grad school. I have a couple of really close and supportive friends, but I miss the extended social and artistic community that I have on the east coast. I read a lot more theory than fiction, which is unusual for me, and I have a more uncertain relationship to my work. It feels more charged with potential, but also way less comfortable.
"Shooting my first video "Dreams in the Witch House" with Cassie Kaufmann and Megha Gupta in Colorado."I like how the tarot is a means of assessing the present, which can itself be so obscure, rather than reading the future, which is impossible. In terms of my own future, for a while I wanted to go live in the woods after I graduated, or to be nomadic and travel around working on farms. But I didn’t keep track of my bank account and one day was surprised to see that all my savings were gone, so now it looks like I’ll have to save up some money before pursuing these plans. Also, I live with a really old Himalayan cat that I’ve had since I was eleven, and so I need to have some sort of home for her since she is not a wanderer. I’ll probably move to one the coasts, apply for some adjunct teaching jobs, but end up as a nanny again. I am also thinking of applying to psychology grad programs in the next few years, and becoming an artist/therapist.
http://www.sophiacaradixon.wordpress.com
http://www.imaginingagirlrevolution.wordpress.com
all images courtesy Sophia Dixon
http://www.imaginingagirlrevolution.wordpress.com
all images courtesy Sophia Dixon
