Four video billboards installed along Wilshire Blvd. Los Angeles as part of the virtual exhibition Echoes, an experimental collaboration between Epoch Gallery and LACMA’s Art + Technology Lab. Link to virtual exhibition HERE
Landlords 1-4 introduces the landlord as mosquito, presented as a series of shimmering long-takes installed along Wilshire Blvd. The landlord-mosquito feeds, and never stops feeding, in a series of eternal loops. The videos conjure the mundane horror of the landlord-tenant relationship within an environment of wealth and property consolidation by large real estate corporations that withhold, rather than provide, housing— an investment strategy that relies on logics of scarcity and extraction.
Sarah Rara, Reverse Women (2023) LED video billboard, Sunset Blvd. West Hollywood (photograph by Evan Walsh)
REVERSE WOMEN(2023)
LED video billboard, silent
Images of running women advance backwards in slow motion, as if the ground is being pulled out from under them, unsettling representations of femininity, agency, power, and progress. Unfolding backward in time, the work creates a sense of suspension, frozen yet always in motion. Reverse Women (2023) seeks to balance and hold multiple positions: affirming the strength and solidarity of women, while also expressing ambivalence and alienation in relation to the category of woman and attendant forms of exclusion. Whether the solitary subjects of Reverse Women (2023) are viewed as heroic or unsettling—or both—will vary along with shifting notions of gendered experience, locating an interval between identification and dis-identification. The gesture of running is pivotal, seen both as a sign of practiced liberation, wellness, and resilience, as well as a symptom of horror: escape, exhaustion, and flight.
As in pharmaceutical advertisements, women run alone, generic stand-ins for the absence of pain. Mimicking the limited visual language used to define the intersection of liberation, care, and femininity, Reverse Women (2023) points to a system of limits that hold (or haunt) the subjects even as they enact a performance of feeling free.
Seen in reverse, desaturated, and in slow motion, an element of horror is inserted, along with a critique of implicit attitudes toward freedom and femininity within a nexus of gender, race, class, illness, and disability.
Commissioned by the City of West Hollywood Moving Image Media Art Program (MIMA)
Feb 1 – May 31, 2023 at 8743 Sunset Blvd. West Hollwood
Through a series of extreme close-ups, Screen Lovers (2022) examines the way we modulate ourselves between onscreen and offscreen realities—as attention, intimacy, and surveillance operate across digital and physical space. Tracking the gaze, Screen Lovers (2022) attempts to discern forms of shelter, thought, and fluid time that are produced via screens and projection. Screen Lovers (2022) questions how we might participate in these hybrid encounters, authoring greater agency for ourselves– navigating welcome and unwelcome forms of visibility, and fissures between identity, technology, and the body.
In Perfect Touch 2021, a set of hands present string figure games in sequence: giving and receiving, relaying connections, modeling networks, patterns to inhabit, digit upon digit. The two channels, situated on opposite faces, form a digital embrace across a divide, mirroring with difference. String figure games model our interconnectedness, searching for a way to visualize the influence that one body exerts on another. Making use of the physical interval, Perfect Touch explores the in-between spaces and invisible entanglements between us, navigating connection alongside distance and loss.
Exhibited as part of Luminex “Dialogues of Light” an outdoor public art exhibition in downtown Los Angeles curated by Carman Zella of NOW ART
Projected on the North and South Faces of 1154 Olive St. Downtown Los Angeles April 11, 2021
Lavender House, 2020, 4k color video with sound, duration 24:08
“Lavender House” narrates the life of a tenant and her evolving relationship to the empty house next door, a rent-controlled building left uninhabited, held from the market by real estate investors. “Lavender House” delivers an embodied history of rent control, anxiety, motherhood, and resistance. Part auto-fiction, memoir, and psychological thriller.
Sarah Rara’s multi-disciplinary practice—including video, sound, writing, performance—explores the position of witness within fragile systems. Rara is a contributing member of the ongoing project lucky dragons (with Luke Fischbeck). Their work, solo and in collaboration, has been presented at such institutions as the Hammer Museum, the Whitney Museum of American Art (as part of the 2008 Whitney Biennial), the Centre Georges Pompidou, Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, London’s Institute for Contemporary Art, PS1 in New York, REDCAT and LACMA in Los Angeles, MOCA Los Angeles, the 54th Venice Biennale, and the Smithsonian’s Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, among others. Their first volume of poems “Earth Breakup” was released by Hesse Press Fall 2015. The chapbook “Chronic Objector” was released by Miniature Garden Spring 2017. Rara is a 2018 recipient of the LACMA Art + Technology fellowship. Rara is Assistant Professor of Moving Image at Williams College.
