Sarah Palmer

Lives and works in Brooklyn, NY

Artist statement

My work envisions a visual conversation about physical space and mythological space, the space of the “real” and the space where images, and imagination, live. Here, I situate the figure in an evolving and collapsing landscape. I consider ideas around climate catastrophe/collapse/adaptation, hybrids of the urban and the natural, and feminine subjectivity/eroticism. Using my own and found photographs from wide ranging sources, my work examines images in proximity, in dialogue. I often use the figure to represent the “id” of the work, the artist-subject within it. This is a figure in crisis within a landscape in crisis, although these crises are not always recognized as such, in earth-time. There are beautiful days, still, in the collapse. My practice is iterative; I photograph, print, rephotograph, sometimes multiple times and on multiple substrates. I use tools inherent to photography, including studio lighting and color gels, polaroid/instant prints, and analog and digital practices. I also print on fabric and make large vinyl wallpapers which I install under my works in exhibition, echoing the continual juxtaposition and “mess” of my studio practice. Frames contain the sometimes chaotic “scenes” within the work, the rectangle serving as an organizational tool. Through reference, adjacency, and materiality, my practice consistently returns to the time travel, the resurrection of the dead, inherent in photography. This is photography’s continual pointing back, through...

Artwork