Deb Sokolow is a Chicago-based artist whose humorously sinister drawings are styled after diagrams and flowcharts. Using materials commonly found in office supply closets, Sokolow pays tribute to the tradition of modern conspiracy theories, exploring plots that involve anything from office life to government cover-ups to Barbara Walters. Sokolow received her MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2004 and her work is included in the permanent collection of the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago.

What initially drew you to the language of comics? How would you characterize your particular approach to the form?

DS: The single-panel cartoons in The New Yorker have always been a favorite of mine, but I think my interest in the narrative form mainly comes from watching a ton of movies and television dramas. At some point, I started to pay closer attention to their structure, be it linear or non-linear, and to the ways characters were developed, the use of foreshadowing, and the narrative voice. While this interest did not translate into directing movies or writing screenplays, I did start to compose these diagrammatic, text-and-image drawings on paper or directly on the wall at a large enough scale so that the story would physically envelop a viewer and hopefully allow for an immersive and (when there's more than one viewer) collective reading experience.

How did you first become interested in conspiracy theories and other such mysterious stories?

DS: My first encounter with the vast universe of mystery and political intrigue occurred in 1986 when, as an impressionable teenager, I happened to witness a highly suspicious briefcase exchange in the bathroom of a Washington, D.C. McDonald's. This was also around the time that my mother was arrested while demonstrating in front of the Soviet Embassy. I was there too, standing across the street. I wasn't involved in the demonstration, just observing, but I remember taking a good look at the building, so grey and terrifying. Years later, I would read about how U.S. intelligence operatives had bugged the building, top-to-bottom, and dug a tunnel underneath it.

Where do you find out about these stories (if you can reveal your sources)? What does the research process entail for you?

DS: The research process involves a lot of Internet surfing, keeping up with the news, and reading books relating to various subjects I'm intrigued by, such as the CIA, drug lords, the press, and politics. My most recent fixation, though, is with Google Maps. When reading up on something, such as "Skid Row" in LA, or the wealthy, men-only "Bohemian Club," I'll use Google Maps to scout out the aerial and street views where these entities are located. It's a poor man's solution to physically visiting these sites, but most of the time it gives me a good, visual feel to a place where some aspect of a conspiracy might be unfolding.

One of the things I find so compelling about your work is how it seamlessly and mysteriously blends fact, fiction, and suspicion—or those uncertain half-truths that often exist in the realm of conspiracy theories, government cover-ups, and mysteries. The aesthetic in which your work is rendered—a style that draws from the "truth telling" discourses of corporate diagrams and informational charts—further confounds this relationship between fact and fiction. Ultimately, it becomes impossible to tell where one starts and the other begins. Can you discuss your relationship to documenting versus fictionalizing?

DS: I'm always hoping that a viewer will come away from the work with some amount of confusion as to what is real and what is fabricated in the story. Perhaps this is a better way of viewing the world in all its complexities, as opposed to being so certain about the way things are and never questioning anything. A few years ago, while my folks were viewing this vein of work for the first time, my mother had an incredibly concerned look on her face. Turning to me, she advised, "Debbie, if there's a meth lab in your apartment building, you really need to call the cops!" My father looked at her and said, "Don't you understand, Sandra? It's a work of fiction!"

The title of your project at the Spertus Museum, The Way in Which Things Operate (2009), seems to embody the essence of your practice—the charting of complex relationships and events, but also an investigation into the language of the charts themselves and what they tell us about how we struggle to organize the world around us. What interests you about the language of venn diagrams, flow charts, and graphs?

DS: The inclusion of Venn diagrams, flowcharts, and graphs in the work is a way for me to break up large blocks of text in order to make the narrative more visual. But I also use these types of charts in the work because they lend a shallow veneer of truth to content since they normally represent serious, objective research, whereas my "research" is anything but.

Another powerful thing about your work is that your murals and drawings exist as both narrative (though not necessarily a linear one) and visual composition. In a way, they're similar to the drawings of Mark Lombardi (to whom you've been compared), in that the viewer has to oscillate between constructing a story and appreciating the overall complexity and structure of the information network. Is this balance between reading and seeing something that you find yourself negotiating?

DS: I've always been a huge fan of Mark Lombardi's drawings; they're so incredibly minimal, and yet they manage to describe these really complex webs of financial influence. I consider it an amazing feat that he managed to edit down his information into such refined compositions; it boggles my mind. I think most people are not used to "reading" visual art, so I'm constantly trying to edit down text, figure out what narrative moments and images need to be more visible than others, but still have enough room to add in the unexpected, ridiculous tangent about buttered noodles or pigeon crap that has no business being there, except that I want it there to catch a viewer off-guard, to allow for a questioning of the narrator's authority or legitimacy.

Your work often employs a structure similar to Choose Your Own Adventure books, as in your mural The Trouble with People You Don't Know (2008). This structure embeds a great amount of agency into the process of viewing, ensuring that different viewers have different "adventures" with your work. On a smaller scale, the "data interpretation" of analyzing graphs and charts also comes into play. Viewers of your work often find themselves drawn in, actively piecing together and interpreting information in order to follow one narrative among many possible narratives. I'm hoping you can speak some about the terms of viewership that you set up in your pieces, and how this might change how they are received or experienced.

DS: I'm fascinated by how people engage with the work when it's at such a large-scale: Watching the fast reader try to navigate a respectful distance around the slow reader, seeing how viewers will accidentally read a piece from end to beginning, hearing people laugh at the same parts. If people don't spend time with it, then the piece isn't working.

Because I want a viewer to spend considerable time with the work, I've come to realize this is only possible if I can create some sort of personal investment in the piece for the viewer. To that end, I recently started working in a more site-specific way. Sometimes the drawing's story relates to the city it's exhibited in, or incorporates the architecture or individuals inhabiting the exhibition venue into its narrative.

There was a 40-foot-long drawing I made for an exhibition at the Van Abbemuseum in Eindhoven, Netherlands that featured the museum as a front for a billionaire CIA agent-gone-rogue and his henchmen, posing as museum guards in black suits and red ties (which is what the guards actually wear in the museum), following you (the viewer) around the museum's galleries, plotting to kill you. When the drawing was shown a second time at the Smart Museum in Chicago, the Smart Museum's guards adopted the Van Abbemuseum's guards' red tie dress code for the opening to go along with the narrative. So the piece had this performative element as well as a certain level of site-specificity that I hope created a surreal "you are in this space and this story you're reading is also taking place in the same space at the same time" feeling.

What are the issues facing us today that you're most interested in, concerned about, or motivated by as an artist? What should we be paying attention to?

DS: Well, as a fairly paranoid individual (partly the result of writing paranoid narratives), I have a strong suspicion that the world as we know it will end soon for one reason or another, so we might as well enjoy ourselves now before things start to get really hairy.