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.
Air Quality examines transparency, filtering, and the double image—playfully returning to age-old questions: is it possible to think two thoughts at once? Is time symmetrical? Is fire alive?
The video is an array of interwoven images: transparent stripes spiral in California sun, a burning candle displaces time, a toxic red hand spins a circular stone, colored smoke explodes against a hot pink backdrop… Air Quality studies how filters both organize and scatter light, connecting this physical process to the clear / unclear transfer of information.
Single channel video, 2012
Duration: 14 minutes 16 seconds
Sound by Luke Fischbeck
“Border Film” —currently in progress— is an encyclopedic document of the infrastructure of border towns and border-crossings, as well as an open-ended meditation on the passage across the political threshold between the United States and Mexico. Produced while traveling repeatedly across the United States-Mexico border, each frame of the film is exposed in both countries to produce a double-image of a landscape suspended between two places. This method of filming—exposing the film twice from points symmetrical on either side of the border—produces a complex wealth of images capturing an array of architectural histories designed to open conversation around foundational issues such as the distribution of wealth and natural resources, transit and trade infrastructure, and immigration. “Border Film” studies how suburban development, population density, commerce and infrastructure intersect with open landscape preserves along the US-Mexico border, while exploring the specific power of an image to render and preserve coincidence between neighboring ecologies.
THE POSSIBLE CHRONICLE (2014)
16mm film transferred to HD video, duration variable.
The Possible Chronicle is a series of short films that examine the making of The Possible at the Berkeley Art Museum in Berkeley, CA. Keeping time through observation, each of The Possible Chronicles presents a poetic eyewitness account gathered from within and without the museum. The Possible Chronicle pays attention to people, processes, and communication. A work in progress about works in progress, Possible Chronicles were released periodically over the course of the exhibition.
ALIAS focuses on a characteristic distortion of sampled images—Aliasing—where one grid fails to cleanly capture another, and separate entities become indistinguishable. One form ingesting another, a parasite larger than its host: ALIAS is a story about solar energy, ruined by observation.
solar rays reached the surface without meaning
depending on the day the observer melts exactly where the sun rises
the heavy sun tethers to hangers-on throws them counter-clockwise
the northern axis points in the direction no one yields
colors de-saturate in the dark
a cylindrical projection graphs the sun rolled for an eye to look through
feel what happened to the horizon after the fires
we need to take all that we can, read the azimuth, and run
when the sun flickers, time abolishes pleasing positions
The Pollinators focuses on the insects, birds, animals, and vectors that pollinate flowers. Filmed against brightly colored backgrounds that both attract and distract pollinators, the video explores wild color spaces, modeling the ultraviolet-rich color range perceived by insects that extends beyond human vision and the RGB colorspace of video.
The Pollinators was filmed over the course of a full calendar year to document a complete annual cycle of flowering.
with sound by Luke Fischbeck and custom seating produced in collaboration with Anzfer Farms
Runtime 65 minutes
This project is funded in part by a generous award from the Harpo Foundation
Special thanks to the following people and organizations who provided research support and access to pollinator habitats for filming:
UC Berkeley Botanical Garden
Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County
Fritz Haeg’s Wildflowering LA presented by LAND
Los Angeles County Arboretum and Botanical Garden
The Growing Home
“Sarah Rara’s The Pollinators is a contemplative video projection of bees doing their thing on flowers, all in bright, saturated hues that feel at once lush and synthetic, beautiful and counterfeit.” – Los Angeles Times
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.
