SARAH PALMER
The Delirious Sun
March 11 – May 6, 2023
Press Release
Mrs. is pleased to present The Delirious Sun, Sarah Palmer’s second solo exhibition with the gallery. For this occasion, Palmer has created an archipelago of photographic prints and vinyl wallpapers, a body of work that forms incisive interconnections on the worlds we inhabit, both physically and psychologically.
In Palmer’s practice, image is the medium is the message. Her photographs intricately combine appropriation and creation. The visual material she arrogates speaks a polyphonic American dialect: vintage erotic feminine nudes, interior magazine clips, AI generated portraits of clowns, found clips from BDSM catalog, paper cuts or pink artist tape are restlessly layered. They dialogue with a more personal register of imagery: a print of the artist’s naked body or the photograph of a lush Mexican garden. Palmer gives herself up to the work. She juxtaposes, tears, prints, shreds and exposes. Her process employs chaos and dissonance to formulate harmonious narratives that question our understanding of the world.
Palmer’s images behave like poems: each assemblage is an act of creation, the expression of a transformation, a process of individuation. Every Shadow (Fingers bleeding) produces edifying discomfort in its beauty. Three iterations of an image of a nude woman upholster a modernist American cityscape. The enticing power of the image confronts photography with its responsibility in the commodification of the female body. It also forces the viewer to acknowledge their potential complicity in toxic ideologies. There is depth to the composition of Palmer’s images and critical flatness to their surface. The artist shows us that images are not neutral, that they are shaped by the social, economic, and political forces that produce and disseminate them. In age of earth and us all chattering, orange-printed images of muzzled women found in BDSM catalogs line up over a dry American desert. The silence of the infinite space clashes with the burning palette of the fetish testimony. The viewer experiences a quiet contemplation of violence, a passive acceptance of aggressive power dynamics. Again, a most discomforting beauty.
Across the gallery, motifs and themes repeat and vary. A red lavish drapery revealing a nude female bust over a black and white desert imagery in The Body Transparent spills over a nearby black and white large-scale vinyl. There, large greyscale folds and pleats are brought to the fore: they are deformed, redundant, they overlap; their decorative performance is being replayed, rewritten by a simple act of repetition and transformation. This same vinyl becomes the perfect backdrop for Indefinite, perhaps infinite, a cascade of pleated steps slitted at their heart by a female nude. In Palmer’s body of work, figures morph and adapt to various media; patterns intertwine. The tangible transformation produces not only meaning but a dynamic, fluid language. The Delirious Sun is a non-hierarchical, decentralized environment where non-linear connections occur. It is a poetic exploration of troubles that occur within the islands of our collective human experience.
-MarieVic
The Delirious Sun is on view at Mrs., 6040 56th Dr., Maspeth, Queens, NY 11378 through May 6, 2023. For more information please contact hello@mrsgallery.com.
Sarah Palmer was born in San Francisco, CA and currently lives in Brooklyn, NY. She received her BA from Vassar College, and her MFA from the School of Visual Arts. Palmer was awarded the 2011 Aperture Portfolio Prize and has had solo exhibitions at Wild Project, Aperture, New York, and Mrs., Maspeth, NY. Her work has been exhibited at Monti8, Italy; the Foam_fotografiemuseum, Amsterdam; the Lishui Photography Festival, China; SPRING/BREAK Art Show, NY; Rachel Uffner Gallery, NY; a solo presentation NADA Miami, FL, with Mrs., Felix Art Fair, Los Angeles and CULT Bureau, Oakland, CA. Palmer has been represented by Mrs. since 2020.
Press
Trompe L’oeil With a Touch of BDSM
John Yau, Hyperallergic
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Editors, Artforum
What to See in N.Y.C. Galleries in April
Martha Schwendener, New York Times