Image courtesy of the artist
From February 3-24, 2023, New City Arts presented Salience, the sea, an exhibition of collage work by Sarah Lawson.
New City Arts' Welcome Gallery
114 3rd St. NE, Charlottesville, VA 22902
First Fridays
February 3 from 5-7:30PM; Artist talk at 6PM
Free and open to the public. All ages welcome.
Gallery Hours
Wednesday-Friday from 10AM-5PM; Saturday from 10AM-2PM
Exhibition Events
The End: A Collage & Zine-Making Workshop with Sarah Lawson: Oct 20 at 7PM
Exquisite Corpses: Community Collage-Making with Sarah Lawson: Feb 12 at 3PM
New City Hearts & Crafts: Feb 14 at 10AM
Covid-19 Visitor Policy
Masks required at the First Friday opening of this exhibition. Please do not come to Welcome Gallery if you have been exposed to COVID-19, are experiencing symptoms of COVID-19, or have been advised to isolate or quarantine.
Listen to the Exhibition Playlist 🎧
About the Artist (courtesy of the artist)
Sarah Lawson (she/they) is a writer and visual artist living in Nelson County, Virginia, whose work explores the natural alongside the artificial, the profound as well as the mundane. Through acts of extraction and reassembly, they imagine new ways of constructing reality and living in this world.
Sarah is the Fall 2022 New City Artist-in-Residence.
Exhibition Statement (courtesy of the artist)
This body of work builds on ideas related to mortality salience—awareness of the inevitability of our own death—as well as the visibility of seas, oceans, lakes, and other waterways as vital reminders of the climate collapse we are currently creating. Like our own bodies, these bodies of water are often sites of trauma and injustice but also opportunities for restoration and liberation.
Consider this a meditation on that world which we are losing, that which we are destroying, even as it offers fleeting moments of transcendence. Also: a developing practice of mindfulness around the ways we live our lives, the ways we trick ourselves into looking away from death and destruction in their myriad forms.
Terror management theory suggests that, when confronted with mortality, individuals and societies will do whatever we can to protect or distract ourselves from the resulting fear of death, in beneficial or detrimental ways. Mortality salience may be wave-like, washing over us throughout our lives, pulling and pushing us like tides as we live, helping us make meaning out of our days or make every effort to avoid doing so. The temptation to dissociate. But what if we can learn to accept death—of the people we love, of the natural world that we share, and of ourselves—as an impetus to create meaning and strengthen connections while we are alive, to focus on interdependence, to leave a legacy of care rather than ego.
By developing a practice around accepting that the end will come, bodily and ecologically, can acts of attention and meaning-making offer new ways of living and dying that are clear-eyed, restorative, and liberatory?
The larger works on display here seek to encourage this meditation on loss, to provide a reason to pause and sit with grief in all its forms: anticipatory grieving for the future, reflective grieving for those and that which has already been lost. Acknowledgement and acceptance of these inevitabilities may provide paths through the paralysis caused by loss and towards the work of mindfulness in how we live our lives and how we care for one another and our world. As a mode of encouraging this reflectiveness, water offers an aesthetic and sensory experience that is both profound and mundane.
The smaller works are selections from the 365/38 project that I undertook in February 2022 (facing a reminder of my own mortality—my birthday) with the goal of creating daily collages as a way of making meaning in a chaotic time, marking the days amidst a pandemic that continues to trouble my perception of linear time, working to stay in my body (to not dissociate), and creating rather than consuming. And maybe being in a body—and being in the world—and accepting the ends that are inherent in both bodies and worlds, maybe that is a first step in managing terror and making meaning. A first step, to be followed by a second, and a third, and so on.
As 365/38 concludes this month, this exhibit has been a chance to reflect on the work that I created (and that which went unmade, an exercise in self-forgiveness), seeing anew how the practice connected me to others, the reminders of days when it was a struggle and those when it was an exaltation to take scissors to paper, finding joy in the smallest scrap of pattern or hint of color amidst ample reminders of our own bodily fragility and the precarity of our climate and planet. This process was emboldened through the opportunity to work as a New City Arts artist-in-residence, where I was able to continue to explore what it means to practice creativity and care, in community or in solitude, but always in gratitude.
Photos by Stacey Evans Photography.
The New City Arts Fall 2022 Residency was made possible with support from The Genan Foundation. This exhibition was made possible with support from the Bama Works Fund of the Dave Matthews Band at the Charlottesville Area Community Foundation.
