Sunday, November 25, 2012

Sarah's Statement

Projection, reflection, repetition, inversion, and reversal have all been consistent formal and conceptual elements of my work. These things all have an effect on perception, and disrupt our expected notions and assumptions about objects and spaces. I often begin with a process of examining the assumptions that I make about the environments and objects around me. Often, a simple shift in how I choose to define something provides fertile territory for exploration. My work is an ongoing attempt to create a real space in which fictional worlds can exist. I make installations, short films and videos that immerse the viewer in a space, and often due to the universally recognizable imagery of these spaces, (a sea-side village, a desert landscape) these works seem to operate somewhere between the personal memory of a place and the collective memory gained through cultural representation of a place.  I strive for a simplicity within my work, and my methods are very intuitive. I'm interested in finding ways to give film and video a physicality, whether through installation, projections, or approaching filmmaking site-specifically. For me, film and architecture are very related. The permeability of a building is often overlooked, but walls, floors and ceilings often provide only a thin barrier between us and the movements and noises of our family, or neighbors. I believe my ability to block out the movements of my neighbors is linked to the suspension of disbelief on which film is dependent. 
In And Then, You Act (New York, NY: Routledge, 2007), theater innovator Anne Bogart quotes Romanian director Andrei Serban as once saying, “[Theater] does not really happen on the stage. It happens in the audience’s head.” The ability of the human mind to internalize both illusion and reality with the only real difference being how they are each contextualized is at the root of my work.