NADA Miami
November 30 - December 3, 2022
Booth 7.11
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Sarah Esme Harrison &
Sarah M. Rodriguez
The Valley is pleased to present new works by Sarah Esme Harrison and Sarah M. Rodriguez for NADA Miami 2022. Drawing upon both artists’ curiosity about ways of being in dialogue with the natural world, this two-person presentation explores relationships between human and non-human life forms, and between life forms and our surroundings.
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Sarah Esme Harrison (b. 1990, New York, New York) lives and works in Brooklyn, New York and Long Island, New York. Both working in and subverting the tradition of plein air landscape painting, her works ask us to interrogate who is looking, and from what perspective. Beginning her paintings outdoors, she makes observational responses to her surroundings. She then moves the paintings into the studio, where she sees them as distinctly human-made, rather than as a piece of the natural world, as it appears while working outside. Building wedge shaped supports for the painted panels, she exaggerates that they are un-natural, their shape prompting viewers to move around them in an exploratory way. The second layer of her paintings, completed in the studio, takes the form of a gate, a symbol of duality. To invite a close look, they adorn and echo, but at the same time, they keep the viewer out. Conventions of beauty tell us to look, and then they distort what we see. These imposing tangles of wrought iron often take a floriate form, blending with the garden, all the while standing in opposition. Harrison’s paintings point to our imperfect love for nature, which is possessive, extractive, and violent.
Sarah M. Rodriguez (b.1984 in Honolulu, Hawaii) is an artist living in Ojo Caliente, New Mexico. Their research, artmaking, and work as an animal trainer are practices in interspecies communication, material experimentation, and generating new definitions of ecology. Their sculptural works often engage plants, animals, and other non-human life forms as collaborators. The sculptures included in our proposal are from an ongoing series of three-dimensional cast aluminum forms; amalgamations of found objects from their environment such as shells, bones, branches, leaves, and seed pods. In the casting process, the assemblages the artist creates from organic materials are burned away, leaving a hardened remnant of the exchange between the artist and the material that has been transmuted from ephemeral to permanent. Our presentation will include several new works made from organic material collected in New Mexico, cast into forms which recall the structure of underground tunnels. A form of non-human architecture, tunnels are invisible from the human field of vision, and withstand the weight of the movement on the surface pressing down on them; a powerful metaphor for the persistence of non-human life forms despite the incursions of human-made structures and systems.
