Landlords

Posted on June 26, 2023October 24, 2023 by Sarah Rara

LANDLORDS (2022)

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.

billboard with monochrome purple/magenta image of mosquito with sparkles, billboard situated in ruins of construction on Wilshire Blvd. Los Angeles

a round wrinkled shape, close up of the body, with a mosquito perched on top against a black background

billboard with monochrome purple/magenta image of mosquito with sparkles, billboard situated in ruins of construction on Wilshire Blvd. Los Angeles

billboard with monochrome purple/magenta image of mosquito with sparkles, billboard situated in front of cement corporate building with grid of windows on Wilshire Blvd. Los Angeles

billboard with monochrome purple/magenta image of mosquito with sparkles, billboard installed on the facade of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art lined with palm trees on Wilshire Blvd. Los Angeles

Sarah Rara

Info | Work

X

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.

download / view CV as PDF

X