On September 11, 2024, NOW Art Founder Carmen Zella sat down with artist Sarah Rara for a live conversation about public art and LUMINEX 3.0 on Instagram (@nowart_la). RSVP here for future LUMINEX Artist Talks.
Below is a transcript of the video:
Carmen Zella (CZ): Hi, this is Carmen Zella, Sarah Rara. Before we get started, I just wanted to check on the audio because we’ve had some audio issues before. So as people are starting to come into – hi! As people are starting to come into the room, if you could just let us know that the audio is good that would be amazing.
I’m super excited for this talk. Because Sarah Rara happens to be one of my absolute favorite artists, so I’m so excited! Okay, thumbs up if the sound is good, thank you. So Sarah came back to – hang on let me just tilt this camera a little bit here – So Sarah, we’re super excited to have you on this IG chat with us right now because you just came back from where?
Sarah Rara (SR): Yeah, so I feel pretty wild right now because I just came back from the Arctic Circle and I was in the Arctic Ocean on a ship for two weeks. So this is my first experience back on land, but also the transition from, I think I was eight degrees from the Electromagnetic North Pole. I was really far north in the Arctic Circle…to Los Angeles, City of Angels, beloved city, amidst an insane heat wave and wildfires.
So I’m very swirly, but very happy to be back home. Yeah.
CZ: Yeah. So tell us a little bit about that experience. What were you doing up in the Arctic Circle?
SR: I was working on a new piece and it’s been a dream of mine to see both the Northern Polar Ice Cap and the Southern Polar Ice Cap. I just feel, during my time on Earth, I need to witness the ice while I can.
So this trip I went to go spend time with the pack ice at the Northern Polar Ice Cap, and just to float along the edge of that pack ice. So yeah, I’m still processing everything I saw, but I was filming and recording sound and we’ll do an exhibition on ice soon.
CZ: Wow, so when you were recording sound, were you dropping the microphones down into the ice packs or tell us a little bit about, walk us through, about the experience there. So you were on a ship?
SR: Yeah, I was mostly on a ship and then we would go out on Zodiacs, which are like small rafts, so we’d be able to get much closer to the various forms of ice, the pack ice, some of the largest glaciers in the world, icebergs that are breaking off of the glaciers, and then like slush that is collected around the melting glaciers.
So there are just so many forms of ice, and then of course calving, which is when glaciers collapse.
CZ: You got to see that?
SR: Yeah, see it and hear it and just experience it.
CZ: How tall were the pieces, like the glaciers that were…?
SR: I don’t know, like the glaciers, the face of the glaciers is like the face of a mountain. It feels geological.
Like they’re massive. So I don’t know if I could put it to a city scale, maybe like 7, 8 stories tall? But it’s also I can’t see what’s below. So that’s just what’s above the waterline. So I did hydrophone recordings. I did contact mic. I did air recordings. Yeah, just capturing as much as I could.
CZ: Have you been to the South Pole yet?
SR: No. Which is a whole other expedition to plan. But now I not only want to go to Antarctica, but I also want to go to Greenland to see another one of the world’s largest glaciers, so hopefully.
CZ: Wow. That’s incredible work.
SR: Yeah, it was really beautiful.
CZ: Did you do, you also filmed it too, right?
SR: Yeah, so I shot a lot of video. I just have so much to sift through. So thank you.
CZ: Yeah that’s incredible.
SR: Yeah, it’s wild.
CZ: So tell us a little bit about, cause that’s gonna be a new body of work that you’re creating. Is there a relationship between that body of work and what you’ve created for Luminex? Like even if it’s just like conceptually threading things through and talk a little bit about that project too.
SR: Yeah, I don’t quite know yet because I don’t know how I feel the Arctic work coalescing. But I don’t know yet till I go back into the materials what it will be. But I think there…I have a sense. I don’t know. Maybe it exists also in ORCHIS, the piece I’m making for luminex where I look mostly at flowers.
But when I go into environments or I look at non-human subjects, I always have a sense of the implication of humans in those spaces. So when I look at the orchid, I really can’t look at it without being confronted with my own human frameworks for gender or sexuality or wealth, paradigms of class, hierarchies, or military power. All these things that the orchid has become a stand in or a symbol for. I can’t really disentangle myself from that when I’m just doing the simplest thing in the world, which is really closely looking at a flower sort of reflecting gender back to me.
And it’s the same thing when I went to the Arctic. I just constantly, even in these remote environments, you could see a trace of the human everywhere. And that was just so startling to me because I almost went there with the dream of sort of escaping, of seeing a place that humans impacted through temperature shift and the melting, but I didn’t know that there would actually be like so much texture of industrialization and extraction and really like human scale activities in the Arctic And every landing we made, there’s just so much plastic.
And so you’d go to a landing and you’d say, Oh, here’s like the entire lifespan of plastic has collected here because no human has been here in hundreds of years. So you just see every generation of plastic piled on top of each other. And the way that these wild spaces reflect back questions about patriarchy or capitalism or even disability was a lot of on my mind.
While I was in these Zodiacs, like going to these places that made me feel very physically vulnerable. So I think there’s something shared in a kind of feminist view or a queer view of subjects that are often proclaimed to be neutral. But in close examination you see the framework as much as you see the thing itself.
So I feel that very much when I look at the orchids, there’s no way to have a view of the flower that doesn’t have so much cultural attachment to it or different things you’re trained to see. So it’s fascinating. I don’t know. There is a connection, but I don’t quite know what it is.
CZ: No, I think it’s, what you’re talking about is like the observation of like how human beings and like man and humanity is like in, created its imprint. And its imprint can be symbolic or can be like actually physical as you’re like noticing in the Arctic. Which is really, it’s quite fascinating because it’s a very, almost like a passive view, it’s a very quiet view, but the observation goes deep. And so talk a little bit about ORCHIS.
And, you’ve got this massive wall. The context in terms of the site’s specificity in an urban environment, in this large scale wall where you’re not just looking at the wall, but you’re looking at this environment that surrounds it at nighttime, in the heart of downtown Los Angeles.
Talk a little bit about your thoughts on what was appealing to you about creating a state, like within the context of the space, the choice of making this work?
SR: Yeah, today – I’m working on it right now, which is why it’s so interesting to talk about it because I’m really talking about it as I make it.
So it’s like day to day things change. But one thing I was thinking about today is the color of these flowers and also the color of the reproduction of the flowers. So they have this almost – orchids themselves – the colors are so fleshy often, but then they’re also very neon. So there’s, even within the flower itself, there’s this kind of almost what I would associate with a synthetic color palette.
It’s just so wild. But I was thinking about it in relationship to the street lighting, which has a very light green, yellow glow. And the flowers literally glow in their environments. So I was just thinking like color wise. Oh, how interesting that they don’t feel separate from this very city, very human-built environment.
And then the other thing I was thinking about is texture and touch, which I think is a sense people don’t often think about with video, but I think of video is a very tactile medium and at that scale and the scale shift of making like a petal so tall, I was almost wondering if I could make the wall feel fragile, like a petal or like a piece of paper.
Beause there’s also paper in the video. And if that the quiver of, like with the quiver of a material that’s light, like a petal or paper or a page turning, how that would destabilize the sense of the building or it’s weight or it’s gravity. So I was like, that’d be incredible if the building starts to feel paper-like.
So just these kinds of thoughts about. Working at that scale and it’s experimental. I don’t really fully know until it’s up there and we get to see it. So there’s a lot of speculation involved and the imaginary of it until it exists. But color and texture working with architecture is really interesting to me. So we’ll see.
CZ: It’s been like, in the last two iterations of Luminex, you started off doing the Cat’s Cradle, and then you had like voiceover with that project, and the second project that you did, you have a close examination of the eye, and I always love those images because they’re so strong, set against the whole context of the downtown, and so that was like the curiosity, because in this particular project, as the audience is going to see, hopefully everyone who’s listening is going to come.
It’s going to be incredible. You’ve refracted and created these prismatic views of orchids. So when we’re talking about it, it’s going to be this like very, the context is going to be through another lens.
SR: Yeah, I think, yeah, the past two pieces are very, I think of them almost as bullseye images.
There’s one shape. And I was really curious in this one to use the whole frame and do something that has more all over quality. And part of that is because the orchid really breaks with any idea of unity. One, because of the diversity of environments they inhabit, they’re basically everywhere. And in the different forms they’ve evolved, they’re not easy to categorize in terms of taxonomy and specifically around sexual difference. So they don’t break down into binary of sex like other plants and other organisms. So they often have three or four reproductive systems within each flower that don’t even interact with each other.
They’re all really doing different things. So whenever I saw the flower, I never wanted to have a single view of it. I wanted to see it from multiple sides simultaneously. And something about the repetition across the frame, it gets to that.
CZ: It also reinforces like your observation, looking at it through a lens.
SR: Yeah, the optics are obvious in this line. You’re like, oh, the light is going through a material, hitting a sensor. So maybe the camera has more of a material presence in this one, but this one’s very like all over and can be disorienting at times.
CZ: So talk about yourself and your voice with this project. Like, who are you? Are you the observer? Are you the…
SR: I don’t know yet where the observer lands in this one, because the frame keeps changing orientation. So it has less of a sense of a stable POV. And more of a sense of one that’s constantly shifting or modulating or maybe even multiplying.
So I think there’s not the sense of a single static observer in this one and maybe that allows the flowers to do something different than simply be looked at. Yeah. Yeah. It’s different. Whatever it is. It’s harder to locate the stance or position of the observer, whether that’s me or whether that’s a viewer.
CZ: Are you going to be doing the voiceover?
SR: I think I might, but I haven’t decided yet. Yeah, I really haven’t decided.
CZ: So the sound is still sort of TBD?
SR: Yeah, the sound is definitely still TBD. Yeah, I’m like deep in the image world right now, and I have thoughts for the sound world. But sound is such alchemy to me that I don’t know until I fully go into it and probably there will be surprises, yeah. Open ended.
CZ: Wow, yeah, can you just in our sort of final – and by the way, if anybody has any questions, please put them in the chat and we will make sure to circulate them with Sarah so that if there’s anything that you guys wanted to know – Sarah’s going to actually be on site for the exhibition.
So for those of you that are in observation of their work, yeah, Sarah’s going to be there. But I wanted to sew up the conversation and just get your thoughts about what is it about the experience of creating public art in this context that you think is appealing to you?
SR: I think part of it is where I locate my art historical lineage or ancestry or something like that. Who are the artists I really look to when I make my work. Artists from the previous generation. So for me, I think some of my earliest formative experiences growing up working class in northern New Jersey and lower Manhattan, late 80s to mid 90s, the first artwork that I ever encountered was art in the street.
So because I was from a working class background, that was my initiation into art, was seeing like ACT UP’s billboards and posters had a huge impact on me. And within ACT UP, you have Gran Fury and you have Fierce Pussy and their amazing work. And then the Times Square billboards specifically are so important to me as an artist.
So thinking of that billboard space, and Jenny Holzer. Specifically the one that was and I may misquote it, but “private property created crime” in the middle of Times Square, was just incredible to me as a young person. And then the Guerrilla Girls did a piece, the exact wording was something like, I may also get it slightly wrong, but the Guerrilla Girls piece it said “I will look at things I don’t want to see,” and just written in that LED billboard. I thought, Oh, art is pretty interesting. Art is powerful. So I think when I make videos, I’m always thinking about that work. So for me, it feels so enormously satisfying to see video in public space, in the streets. Because I just think of that person seeing it for the first time.
CZ: Who might not have had exposure before.
SR: Exactly. And feeling seen by it, but also something new being revealed. That’s exciting to me. And I know it works because it happened to me. So I’m like, I know this happens.
CZ: Yeah. That’s awesome. I’m super excited.
SR: Yeah. I love those works.
CZ: Yeah. No, I know which one you’re talking about, and Guerrilla Girls, they’re one of my favorites. Yeah. So everybody, thank you so much for joining. We’re both squinting cause we can’t see. It’s like really far away. But yeah, anyways, Luminex, October 5th, put it on your calendar and yeah, thank you everybody. We’ll see you there. Bye.
SR: Bye!