Sarah Esme Harrison
The Place With 10,000 Doors
March 23 – May 4, 2024
Painting is a way to remember that the world is magical, which to me means alive with meaning.
As I paint outside from observation, en plein air, I begin to see how perfectly the landscape corresponds to my interiority, and how much I can learn about myself by paying attention to it. For example, here is a tree: the branches fork off in two, just like my thoughts, and here they break off again, and here their ends are buds; each will turn into a bright green leaf and then eventually die and harden and begin to make a branch. An idea repeated becomes structural, like a belief. Here, behind the tree, is the sun. It appears mainly as evidence, by creating light and shadows. Like love or death, it shows up as an organizing principle, but never in person. Everything is poignant. When I identify an outer landscape with my inner one, the world becomes mysterious again.
Back in my studio, I add the gate to the painting. The landscape becomes a supportive structure that allows me to improvise, and the gate turns into a doubling agent that references the original experience of painting the landscape. The gates come from my imagination, but I make them from observations of my belongings. As in a dream, familiar things turn up in the tide, arranged not as they were, but compelled into strange new clusters. The gates hide parts of the landscape and expose me instead.
Sometimes I feel heretical when I use the gate to conceal parts of the plein air painting. At the same time, on their own, the naked landscapes strike me as an obscenity by omission. I make paintings about Earth, not images of utopia. In the United States, where people subject the natural world to their fantasies about possession, control, and safety, the land contains a taboo. I add the gate as a form of anti-censorship: a way of owning up to that taboo, and implicating myself in it. The gate is my movable cloister, a place that lets me see. It is also an acknowledgment of my shadow.
The title The Place with 10,000 Doors came to me while I was driving from Bozeman, Montana to Taos, New Mexico. I was in the middle of working on the “gate paintings” for this exhibition, and the shift in imagery—gate to door—at first felt like a misnomer. Farther down the road, I began to see that the title refers to the psychological space of painting, which I can access in different ways, at different points in time, or in different places.
❦ Text by Sarah Esme Harrison
Sarah Esme Harrison (b. 1990, New York, New York) lives and works in Brooklyn and Long Island, New York. She graduated from The Yale School of Art with an MFA in Painting in 2017. She has held solo exhibitions at Nicelle Beauchene (New York City), Saint George Street (London), and The Valley (Taos). Recent group exhibitions include “The Fantasticals” at DIMIN (New York City), “All Watched Over By Machines of Loving Grace” at Brackett Creek Exhibitions (Brooklyn), and “Fronds” at Marinaro Gallery (New York) and Brackett Creek Exhibitions (Bozeman). Her works are held in private collections across the United States and the UK, and in the permanent collection of the Ogunquit Museum of American Art.
The Place With 10,000 Doors is Harrison’s second solo exhibition with the gallery. This exhibition sees the artist contend with possession, loss, and transformation through a series of landscapes made in the Western United States. Simultaneously engaging and subverting the tradition of plein air landscape painting, Harrison examines her relationship with land, materialism, and cultural myth-making to find the paradoxes and magic of her surroundings. In the past, she has primarily worked with the landscape of Eastern Long Island. In 2023, Harrison spent several months in Taos, New Mexico and Bozeman, Montana, painting unfamiliar terrain.
