Imagined Interiors
Jennifer Wroblewski
Sarah Sagarin’s thickly painted, shockingly imagined corporal interiors sit in the intersection of two major shifts in recent art: the improbable reemergence of the figure as viable subject matter and the dominance of painting as preferred medium. A series of Sagarin’s recent works has been included in an online juried exhibition posted by Projekt30, one of many new, digital clearinghouses providing exposure for emerging artists. The show, originally posted in February, will continue to be available in the archive section at www.projekt30.com.
Sagarin, who lives and works in Brooklyn, investigates as subject matter the fleshy functionality of the female body. She flips the body inside out to present interior biologies that may not be commonly accepted by science, but that often feel strangely familiar. In Suspension of Disbelief #1, an austere white pelvic bone, stripped of its flesh, sits in space, like a levitating fruit bowl. Supported by the pelvis is a mysterious, large spherical object, the color of Mars or of an unpolished garnet, glowing orange but crusted with a strange, brownish green substance. Issuing from the sphere are four ligament type bands, which reach longingly out of the form, dissolving into the gray ground of the canvas.
In Suspension of Disbelief #5, a female form seems to emerge from some geological mass. Is it a volcano? A mountain? In some in-between state of animation evoking the current cinematic obsession with human cloning, at least the question of what it might look like to fabricate a fully formed human adult. This woman’s arms look like they could support weight, but her belly is collapsed, the skin of her abdomen stretched violently over the crest of her pelvic bone. The focal point of the image is a carefully rendered navel, positioned directly in the center of the painting, as if inviting the viewer to move directly into her interior via the belly button.
There is rarely any reference made to the mind, but these biological forms come equipped with their own peculiar self-determination. These muscles, bones and organs appear to be thinking and feeling.
In terms of both content and handling of the paint, Sarah’s work brings to mind Francis Bacon and Jenny Saville, perhaps even a bit of Lucien Freud. She uses paint idiosyncratically and generously, creating believable imagined forms, while also leaving on the surface of the work some clues to her own process of discovery. Where the work clearly diverges from a contemporary norm is that these images resist the current role demanded of easel painting, to exist as a copasetic, resolved object implying some inherent financial value while bringing color to a room. Conversely, Sarah’s images present bleeding, weighty forms. She is painting about the one thing we all share, embodiment. Many, certainly, will not find affinity with these images, but those who do will be moved. To look at these images is almost to remember some anguished moment when our embodiment was the cardinal impediment to some desire, wish or fantasy.
Viewer’s of the online exhibition presented by Projekt30 will, unfortunately, miss out on the opportunity to see these images in their true size and thus will not experience the work’s curious ability to simultaneously beguile and repulse. These women are human-sized and the experience of standing in front of them certainly begs Freud’s question of friend or foe?
Painters and painting enthusiasts will enjoy the emotion and intensity brought to bear by Sarah’s formidable comfort with the medium and understanding of form. Suspension of Disbelief #3 features a disembodied ribcage with such formal integrity the viewer may be tempted to reach for it, to intervene in some way in an attempt to help it survive; for it is clearly in a state of some distress. Surprisingly, Sarah writes in her artist statement "that we normally associate these things (bones, organs, muscles) only with violence, sickness and death because, for most of us, that is the only time we confront them." To the artist, these works may be a celebration of life, but to the viewer, their graphic nature certainly implies some manner of suffering and/or distress, begging a worthwhile question: is it inherently distressing to be a woman in this strangely post-feminist, violent and dishonest era.
