SoiL Thornton’s practice engages with the underlying conditions of the exhibition, presentation and representation of artistic production. Who represents what? And what is it that constitutes meaning and value?

With Pay It Forward, Thornton questions these processes, and the ways by which a society constitutes agreed norms and sets up established power relations. Thornton presents three different materials: firstly, an acquired original script of the film Pay It Forward, which shares character Trevor’s principle of “pay[ing] it forward,” where one should do something good, so that the good deeds snowball. This material is then confronted with reproductions of Thornton’s Covid-19 shelter in place fecal photo archive, depicting the product of a recovery process produced by the body itself. The third set of material contains images scanned from Der, Die, Das: The Secrets of German Gender, a book outlining the principles of the three grammatical genders in the German language.

Thornton’s work has an abiding interest in questions of how things appear and how meaning comes to be. The image material is accompanied by an introductory text by Nadine Droste.

This artist book follows Thornton’s first European solo exhibition entitled Decomposition Evaluation at Kunstverein Bielefeld.

SoiL Thornton was born 1990 and lives and works in New York. They have recently had solo exhibitions at Secession Vienna (2023), Kunstverein Bielefeld (2022), Essex Street, New York, and Morán Morán, Los Angeles (both 2021).