sarah barsness

speaking of webs. my teacher sarah barsness is someone who i truly admire. she has taught me 4 classes at the academy including fine art which i am taking with her now. i really love talking with her because of the amount of knowledge, love, and appreciation she has for art. she taught me mixed media photography last year and thats when i really started to understand installation and multiple media art. she started as a photographer and now she mainly creates mixed media and installation work. she loves collecting objects and then using them to create and remember past memories. she says she works in excessism opposed to minimalism and sometimes it takes her over a year to complete a single piece. here is some of her work along with her artist statement underneath.

Despite modern notions of individuality, the self remains a concept caught, inextricably, in a web of contexts. We are not exclusive products of our own will, but a complex amalgam of our bodies, relationships and environments. The self is not solid, fixed, and discrete, but fluid, mercurial, and without distinct edges, as the changing contexts of life demand its constant reinvention. This is why memory is so fickle – it must conform to our ever-changing selves.

The sense of a discrete self has never been so precarious, elusive, and deeply sought after as in our times – global tension and the reordering of our daily lives through technology have created deep anxieties about the fragility and containment of our personal identity.

I migrate between image and object as I explore the complex layers of the ongoing construction, deconstruction and reconstruction of the contemporary self and its precarious yet pervasive relationship to memory. I create images using both traditional and contemporary techniques – printmaking, drawing, painting, sewing, crocheting and collage as well as photography and digital imaging – and incorporate found objects and materials. Webs and fibers creep through my prints and drawings while, in my installations, found objects fill up interior spaces, and scraps of used clothing and images creep and spread in space, describing the simultaneously tenuous, tenacious, fugitive, delicate, flexible, and dynamic, nature of the self.

-sarah barsness-