Souvenir Garden
Sarah Esme Harrison

March 6 – April 17, 2021

The Valley is pleased to announce its first solo exhibition with Brooklyn-based painter, Sarah Esme Harrison. The exhibition, titled Souvenir Garden presents a series of Harrison’s recent paintings which begin outside; often in Jamesport, on Long Island, where she spent much of her childhood. Harrison then brings the observational paintings back into her studio to finish them, where she begins to see them as distinctly human-made, rather than as a piece of the natural world as it appears while working outside. She often exaggerates this fact by building wedge-shaped supports for the painted panels, seeking to emphasize them further as human-made objects and to ask viewers to move around the paintings in an exploratory way. 

Drawing from the land for both concept and material, Harrison’s paintings point to her awareness that our attempts to harness the beauty of the natural world are often extractive, violent, and jeopardize the climate. The pigments in her oil paint are harvested from the land, as are the real-life versions of the jewels and metals she integrates into her compositions. In the process of making these paintings, Harrison grapples with creating images of nature in the era of climate change caused by colonial capitalism. Looking at nature, and looking at these paintings, she hopes we feel a sense of eternity, but also an urgent sense of loss.