Rhonda Sometimes makes pictures about her queer and feminist search for authentic and inhabitable identities and her journey to find a creative voice inside a culture structured by inequality. In this context, she is particularly interested in how myths, stereotypes, and rules that are both normative and destructive are propagated at the level of the family. She engages the collage process to collapse distinctions between elements often assumed to be contradictory: the domestic and the political, craft and “fine art”, dream and reality, shame and celebration, abstraction and representation. Rhonda Sometimes works in what she calls a middle place, attempting to embody the tensions between these binaries in order to evoke and affirm feelings that are at times unspoken or denied -- awkward balance, unsettling rage, playful seriousness.
Rhonda Sometimes is the artist name for a cat lover born in Pittsburgh, PA in 1979. She received a B.A. in painting at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia in 2001, and an M.F.A. from the Slade School of Fine Art in London in 2004. She also completed a master’s degree in counseling psychology from the University of Pennsylvania Graduate School of Education in 2009. Rhonda Sometimes has worked as a mental health therapist for children and families and as an art teacher in both Philadelphia and Pittsburgh, where she currently lives.