artist lecture: sarah rara
I attended the first of the Arts and Art History Department Visiting Artist Lecture Series, with Sarah Rara. Sarah is a multimedia sound and video artist based in LA. They tend to create work in the areas of social commentary and projects of personal pursuit. While I did not personally love a lot of Sarah’s work, I was still very inspired by their talk and took a lot of ideas away to apply to my own creative pursuits and explorations.
The most important takeaway for me was Sarah’s suggestion to create a playlist of every single song that has had an impact on your life. Sarah’s was intentionally grating, where they selected songs that did not flow together well on purpose. The goal of this playlist is to assemble all the pieces of your past and your present and to dig deep into memory and experience to see the songs that have impacted you, all for different reasons. Another comment that stuck with me is Sarah stared into the audience while they told us: “the playlist is finished when you’re dead".”
This comment was the intro segway into a description of art and life, tied to her past, path to art, and her current work. I really liked the concept that the playlist becomes a symbol for life. It is given meaning by your death, as it is an assembly of your life through music that can only end when you die. I will absolutely be making my own life playlist as a creative exploration in the coming weeks.
As for their work, a lot of the video and sound work was not really my style, but a couple of them left their mark in my memory. I liked a public installation that Sarah made where a looping video of various eyes is projected on the side of a 5 story building in LA, with an accompanying looping audio track (at different lengths so they never overlap in the same way). The audio was this creepy robotic list of things that screens can be (connection, a window to the soul, something that melts our brains, other more ridiculous ideas), but I mostly liked the asymmetric component of the two parts of the installation.
Another work that I found interesting was called Lavender House. This was a video project that brought attention to the evil nature of landlords in a creepy but at times funny compostion, all highlighted with lots of purple. There is a disturbingly long clip of a mosquito sucking the blood of someone’s hand, while discussing the aggressive, white male-dominated, overbearing role of landlord. I liked the play on color and the quipy commentary paired with unsettling visuals.
The last work that I remember was this sound project where Sarah and their partner had made a sound synthesizer that needed human touch to work. So varying pressures and types of touch would make different sounds. I really liked that Sarah described this project as an installation that would swell and ebb as people collected and touched arms, hands, etc., then move on. A dynamic experience.
Overall it was really interesting to hear from an artist and to understand their background and reasoning behind their art. While I might not like all the art I come in contact with, I still found it important to be exposed to art in all of its forms, and to very likely have subconscious inspiration that will appear later in my life without me even realizing. Let the art explorations continue!