Born New York, NY, 1985 / BA, Carleton College / MFA, Cranbrook Academy of Art, Bloomfield Hills, MI / Lives in Detroit
Sophie Eisner is not from Detroit, and does not put on airs about it. As a young artist who moved to the area in 2013 and to the Motor City in 2015, she thinks it’s important to do a lot of listening. Eisner travels extensively, having just recently returned, for instance, from Mongolia. Wherever she goes and whatever she makes there, she brings elements from her childhood home in New York City with her. One of the notable qualities of Eisner’s practice is her ability to take a familiar object in a familiar place, such as the pink tiles in the bathroom of her studio, and use materials, such as pigmented silicone, to think about the object from a different perspective. By presenting this same object with different materials and shape, Eisner invites the viewer to recall that they have seen this object somewhere before, and to wonder where. Eisner’s work gives viewers a fuzzy feeling of familiarity.
