NOVEMBER 2024
CENTER GALLERY
Hotter Faster Louder | Sara Tabbert
I spent much of the past summer in a long-anticipated residency, the Windgate Arts Residency Program, offered through the Museum for Art in Wood in Philadelphia. During my residency I continued my work in marquetry, using the focused time to dive into new ways to layer, carve, sandblast, and print onto wood veneer surfaces. This experimental approach is informed by my background as a printmaker, where I’ve grown comfortable with the push and pull of adding and subtracting material to create images. Marquetry is traditionally a woodworking technique of great precision. I embrace the ongoing challenge of executing at a high level, while also choosing to approach working with the material in a less precious, less predictable way.
Summer in Philadelphia was defined by intense heat, overwhelming noise, and my own disorientation as I wandered the city. I walked through unimaginable amounts of trash, wild vacant lots, and observed the march of condominiums through old neighborhoods. I delighted in the unplanned sky party of orange electrical insulators and nests of wiring, the city’s baby blue bridges, the murals, graffiti, and ornamentation. I felt the challenges and beauty of such a peopled place.
Upon returning home, I realized the visual contradictions I sought out in an urban setting are the same friction points I look for everywhere. In a city’s density, the collisions seem louder and brighter, but they are all around me at home as well. The elemental nature of delicate vines climbing an iron fence in a trash-filled lot is not that different from the lacy ice forming on the edge of a mud puddle in my driveway. There is an energy in the edges, where disparate things that don’t necessarily make sense together are found in proximity, forced into accidental coexistence.
On display are the result of such musings, meanders and focused labor. I see these pieces as records of place and travel, riddles of process, and a reflection of my cheerful curiosity during a time of accelerating tension.
This exhibition has been supported by the Museum for Art in Wood’s Windgate Arts Residency Program and by a grant from the Alaska State Council on the Arts and the National Endowment for the Arts, with additional support from Rasmuson Foundation’s Career Opportunity Grant.
Photographs by Hans Hallinen