ORCHIS (2024)
ORCHIS examines orchid flowers and their relationship to gender, queerness, politics, and desire. Wildly diverse, gender-bending, and found in nearly every habitat on Earth, ORCHIS looks at natural and cultural histories of the orchid as queer-coded, while also wielded as symbols of military and economic power.
Perfect Touch, 2021, 2-channel 5k color video
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
Sarah Rara’s multi-disciplinary practice— including video, sound, performance, and writing— explores the position of witness within fragile systems. Their work in sound and moving image considers gender, queerness, technology, disability, and illness, in connection with environmental research. Regarding the environment as relational and invested with notions of identity, Sarah Rara’s work considers the socio-political and personal dimensions of sensing technologies. They are a primary organizer of the ongoing project lucky dragons. Their work, solo and in collaboration, has been presented at such institutions as the Whitney Museum of American Art (as part of the 2008 Whitney Biennial), the Hammer Museum, the Centre Georges Pompidou, Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, London’s Institute for Contemporary Art, PS1 in New York, REDCAT and Human Resources in Los Angeles, MOCA Los Angeles, the 54th Venice Biennale, Documenta 14 in Athens, and the Smithsonian’s Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, among others. Rara is a 2018 recipient of the LACMA Art + Technology fellowship and current artist-in-residence at Bangkok 1899, Bangkok, Thailand. Rara is Assistant Professor of Moving Image at Williams College.
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