Cassandra Sohn
US, born Santa Fe, NM 1978
Sohn calls the Berkshires of Western Massachusetts home. She is a curator and is the Owner / Director of Sohn Fine Art in Lenox, MA. Sohn founded the company in 2011 and runs all departments of the business, including curating featured exhibitions – www.sohnfineart.com. Sohn exhibits her own photography world-wide. She has been published in several books and was the main contributing photographer for Window on the Park—New York's Most Prestigious Properties On Central Park, published by Images Publishing. She graduated from the New School in Manhattan with a Bachelor of Arts in English and Photography.
Classically trained in the arts from an early age, Sohn experimented with many mediums and discovered her passion for photography in her early twenties. Photography based, she captures her images in the natural world. In recent years she started applying pastel and pencil to her print, creating contemplative mixed media works that nod to abstraction.
Growing up in the Sangre de Cristo Mountains of Santa Fe, New Mexico, and now calling the Berkshires in western Massachusetts home, Sohn has a strong connection to the mountains, but has always been drawn to water, which is a recurring theme in her work. Fascinated by its ever-moving, ever-changing nature, Sohn is captivated by water’s capacity to elicit stillness and strength. Like our emotions, its form is always affected by its surrounding environments, both inner and outer. It is both a mirror and a vessel of depth and can alter our perceptions of the “real”. Scientists have referred to having contact with the ocean as “blue space” which provokes feelings of peace and calmness. That “blue space” actually changes the way your brain reacts to its environment. It is said that it triggers your mind like meditation, allowing you to tune everything else out and reflect on what you need to focus on.
Sohn’s most recent body of work “Water” was photographed in Antigua, Mexico, Florida and New York. These images are created utilizing multiple, long exposures done in-camera. The photographs are printed on watercolor paper and hand worked with pastel and pencil. The photographs are ethereal and dreamlike, abstracting our sense of place and questioning the edge between the real and unreal. This body of work was created during a challenging time in Sohn’s life. In the process of producing the work, she became acutely aware of how turbulence and peacefulness can co-exist, in the same image and in life, that one can be found in the other. Through the process of the work she found peace, trust and beauty during times of change.
In 2012, she released “A Sea Feeling in the Mountains” motivated by 19th century artists and writers who found inspiration in the Berkshire region and its visual and metaphorical connection to the sea. Sohn followed in the footsteps of Melville, Hawthorne and Thoreau (amongst others) by hiking the same paths, visiting their homes, and studying their works, photographing each environment with the pursuit of a larger meaning and interpretation in her own work. Just like the philosophers that inspired her, Sohn’s images reflect queries into humanity and identity, as well as a quest for a larger meaning.
