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I’ve needed to see Sarah Palmer’s work ever since I found it in 2019, along with her debut solo present, Outs & Ins, at Mrs. (November 16, 2019–January 18, 2020), which I didn’t get to. I made it to her second exhibition, The Delirious Solar at Mrs. (March 11–Could 6, 2023), however not till the final week of the present. This prompted me to do one thing I not often do: I received in contact with Palmer — whom I didn’t know — and organized a studio go to at her gallery.
As soon as I noticed the work, I spotted that what had caught my consideration have been the varied methods she launched and deployed spatial relationships in her photographic tableaux. Derived from quite a lot of photographic sources, starting from BDSM and elegance magazines to rephotographed photos to authentic images from highway journeys, Palmer synthesizes photos, whereas treating images as visceral issues, connected to or resting on a bigger floor, on which they forged their shadow.
Whereas she is clearly within the objectifying gazes which can be developed and refined by a consumerist, patriarchal society, her juxtapositions, lurid shade, and strategy to scale transfer her work past the dry didacticism of earlier conceptual photographers and collagists, similar to Martha Rosler and Sarah Charlesworth, with whom she studied on the Faculty of Visible Arts, New York, after incomes her BFA at Vassar.
The traces of narrative that I may tease out from the jpegs I noticed of Palmer’s work didn’t fairly cohere, nor did they dissipate with time, which intrigued me sufficient to contact her. In “age of earth and us all chattering” (2022), adverts for BDSM hoods and head harnesses are affixed with strips of magenta tape to a view of a mountainous desert. A fringe of bigger images encircles smaller ones. A number of the adverts are orange-red, whereas the others are the grayscale typical of cheaply printed catalogues.
By arranging the pictures with an eye fixed to their dimension and placement, Palmer establishes completely different tensions between the layered house of the bondage images, their forged shadows, and the spatiality of the desert. Viewers uncover potential meanings by recognizing the completely different sorts of layering and juxtapositions they encounter on this and different works by the artist. I say “potential” as a result of Palmer’s artwork resists any reductive studying, leaving viewers to invest and replicate upon it.
What does it imply to stick adverts picturing masked and hooded heads of women and men, typically with tubes controlling their air consumption, to a desert vista? What’s Palmer’s touch upon respiratory, management, and entry? Is she inviting viewers to think about one thing concerning the doubtlessly fictive one who “taped” these photos to the desert view. Whereas the juxtaposition between managed respiratory and open desert is obvious, how the viewer connects is extra open ended. By suggesting that “age of earth and us all chattering” could possibly be a discovered artifact or file of somebody’s life, Palmer folds one other degree of hypothesis into the work.
This disorienting feeling can also be true of “Hours Crammed with Distance” (2023), which presents a barely angled, layered view of images and journal photos mendacity on a big picture that’s the similar dimension as the bottom. By making layered photos wherein images are “issues,” Palmer connects her work to the trompe l’oeil custom of determine/floor reversals that features John F. Peto, René Magritte, and Jasper Johns. The Advantageous Arts Museums of San Francisco web site describes Peto’s hyperrealist portray “The Cup We All Race 4” (1900) as “a visible rebus that goes past illustration to query the boundaries between actuality and phantasm.”
By documenting precise images mendacity on a bigger picture, Palmer melds a proper system of trompe l’oeil along with her content material, which largely pertains to the objectification of girls and the way girls select to current or stage themselves. What’s the relationship between objectification and displays? With out reaching any fastened conclusions, the artist explores the alternative ways girls are offered or current themselves in each mainstream and underground media and shops, from extensively distributed photos to her personal images.
Within the pink-framed “Hours Crammed with Distance,” images and {a magazine} unfold are scattered atop a sample of dragonfruit, which signifies the facility of transformation. The journal unfold reveals a person kissing the neck of a bare-breasted lady. Subsequent to them is a sunken whirlpool stuffed with pink water, wherein a nude lady rests. The pictures, depicting girls who’re nude or in lingerie, are largely completely different shades of pink and orange, in distinction to the person’s blue go well with and the background of the journal picture — an evening view of a distant city panorama, suggesting Los Angeles seen from the Hollywood Hills.
The works are unsettling as their areas pull us in, encouraging us to maneuver round inside this fictive/precise house and take into account the juxtapositions and connections. What connects the disparate photos and issues is the sense that we’re continuously immersed in and surrounded by reproducible photos that function a type of advertising. What can we purchase and what can we purchase into?
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