I wanted to see Sarah Palmer’s work since I discovered her in 2019, with her first solo exhibition, Out & Ins, at Mrs. (November 16, 2019 – January 18, 2020), which I was unable to access. I did it at his second show, The delirious sun chez Mme (from March 11 to May 6, 2023), but not before the last week of the show. This prompted me to do something I rarely do: I got in touch with Palmer – who I didn’t know – and arranged a studio visit to his gallery.
Once I saw the work, I realized what caught my attention were the different ways she introduced and deployed spatial relationships in her photographic tableaux. Derived from a variety of photographic sources, ranging from BDSM and style magazines to rephotographed images to original road trip photographs, Palmer synthesizes the images, while treating the photographs as visceral things, attached or resting on a larger surface , on which they cast their shadow. .
Although she is clearly interested in the objectifying gazes developed and refined by a consumerist and patriarchal society, her juxtapositions, grim colors and approach to scale move her work beyond the dry didacticism of earlier conceptual and collagist photographers, such as Martha Rosler and Sarah Charlesworth, with whom she studied at the School of Visual Arts in New York, after earning her BFA at Vassar.
The narrative traces I could detect from the jpegs I saw of Palmer’s work were not entirely consistent, nor did they dissipate over time, which intrigued me enough to contact her . In “Age of Earth and Us All Chatting” (2022), advertisements for BDSM hoods and head harnesses are affixed with strips of magenta duct tape over a view of a mountainous desert. A perimeter of larger photographs encircles the smaller ones. Some of the ads are orange-red, while others are grayscale typical of low-cost print catalogs.
By arranging the images according to their size and location, Palmer establishes different tensions between the layered space of the bondage photographs, their cast shadows, and the spatiality of the desert. Viewers discover possible meanings by recognizing the different types of layering and juxtaposition they encounter in this and other works by the artist. I say “possible” because Palmer’s art resists any reductionist reading, leaving viewers to speculate and reflect.
What does it mean to stick advertisements depicting the heads of masked and hooded men and women, often with tubes controlling their air intake, to a view of the desert? What is Palmer’s comment on breath, control and access? Does it invite viewers to imagine something about the potentially fictional person who “recorded” these images on the desert view. While the juxtaposition between controlled breathing and the open desert is apparent, the way the viewer connects is more open. By suggesting that “The Age of the Earth and We All Gossip” might be a found artifact or a record of someone’s life, Palmer weaves another level of speculation into the work.
This sense of disorientation is also true of “Hours Filled with Distance” (2023), which features a slightly angled, superimposed view of photographs and magazine images resting on a large image the same size as the floor. By creating superimposed images in which the photographs are “things”, Palmer links his work to the trompe l’oeil tradition of figure/ground inversions that includes John F. Peto, René Magritte and Jasper Johns. The San Francisco Museums of Fine Arts website describes Peto’s hyperrealistic painting “The Cup We All Race 4” (1900) as “a visual puzzle that goes beyond representation to interrogate the boundaries between reality and illusion “.
By documenting actual photographs based on a larger image, Palmer merges a formal trompe-l’oeil device with its content, which largely relates to the objectification of women and how women choose to present themselves. or to stage. What is the relationship between objectification and presentations? Without drawing any definitive conclusions, the artist explores the various ways in which women are portrayed or present themselves in mainstream and underground media and media, from widely circulated images to her own photographs.
In the pink “Hours filled with distance” frame, photographs and a magazine are scattered over a dragon fruit pattern, signifying the power of transformation. The magazine spread shows a man kissing the neck of a topless woman. Next to them is a sunken whirlpool filled with red water, in which lies a naked woman. The photographs, depicting women naked or in lingerie, are largely different shades of red and orange, in contrast to the man’s blue suit and the background of the magazine image – a nighttime view of ‘a distant cityscape, suggesting Los Angeles as seen from the Hollywood Hills.
The works are unsettling because their spaces draw us in, prompt us to move through this fictional/real space and consider juxtapositions and connections. What connects disparate images and things is the sense that we are constantly immersed and surrounded by repeatable images that serve as a form of marketing. What do we buy and what do we buy into?
