Written by Nicole Gaudier
Sara Pedigo ‘s works Swimmer and In the Night Kitchen will be in the Our Shared Past exhibition, on view in the Stein Gallery from December 17, 2013 to May 25, 2014.
A statement from the artist:
“Three quotes taken from Siri Hustvedt’s Mysteries of the Rectangle: Essays on Painting:
Sara Pedigo, In the Night Kitchen, 2013, from the film stills What’s For Dinner, Oil on canvas
‘The longer I live the more I would like to put the world in suspension and grip the present before it’s eaten by the next second and becomes the past. A painting creates an illusion of an eternal present, a place where my eyes can rest as if the clock has magically stopped ticking.’
‘Real photographs always evoke loss. Looking at a snapshot, even when I am unfamiliar with the people, the room, or the landscape it captures, I feel that I am holding a trace of what has disappeared. Ordinary families document these losses regularly and with nostalgia for babies now grown up, young women turned into grandmothers, the youthful former self and, most importantly, the dead. As Roland Barthes wrote in Camera Lucida: ‘Painting can feign reality without having seen it.’ The lens, unlike the painter, must have something out there to record.’
‘I have often thought of paintings as ghosts, the specters of a living body, because in them we feel and see not only the rigors of thought, but the marks left by a person’s
Sara Pedigo, Swimmer, 2013, from the film stills Floating, Oil on canvas
physical gestures-strokes, dabs, smudges. In effect, painting is the still memory of that human motion, and our individual responses to it depend on who we are, on our character, which underlines the simple truth that no person leaves himself behind in order to look at a painting.”
There will be artist appearances at the Stein Gallery January through April. Each Saturday, artists from the exhibition will be in the Gallery from 1 p.m. to 3 p.m. Others will make appearances throughout the day on Weaver Free Saturdays, and on Tuesday evenings during the exhibition.
