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RECENT / UPCOMING:
Touch Grass, Nancy Margolis Gallery
October 15 – December 6, 2024
Nancy Margolis Gallery is thrilled to announce Sarah Pater: Touch Grass, our debut solo exhibition for the Philadelphia artist opening next month in our Online Viewing Room. Touch Grass explores the tension between physical and virtual experiences. For Pater, the title holds a double meaning — conveying both the literal act of touching grass to reconnect with nature and its use as internet slang to suggest stepping away from the digital world for a reality check.
In this new body of work, I've been combining images of skies, insects/animals, nature, and still life with images that evoke the undersea cables that comprise the physical internet. I've been trying to imagine what these undersea cables that impact everything about modern life look like. There are very few photographs of the cables, and I thought that made them good subjects for painting — an opportunity for abstraction and invention while simultaneously referring to something literal/physical. — Sarah Pater
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Online Viewing
A catalog is available from the gallery here.
In conjunction with NMG’s online presentation of the exhibition, the featured paintings are installed in the artist’s studio for in-person viewings.
The studio is open to visitors Saturday afternoons & by appointment. Email sarahrpater@gmail.com or check @sarahrpater for information about visiting.
Crane Arts, #308 (3rd Floor)
1400 N. American St.
Philadelphia, PA 19122
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Inquiries: margolis@nancymargolisgallery.com @nancymargolisgallery
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PAST:
Here, Before and After Me: Xingze Li and Sarah Pater, Yi Gallery, New York
April 13 – May 11, 2024
A two-person exhibition by Brooklyn-based Xingze Li and Philadelphia-based Sarah Pater. Opening reception will be held on Saturday, April 13 from 3 - 6 pm. Please direct inquires to info@gallery-yi.com.
Featuring new work by both artists, this exhibition highlights the formal and conceptual dialogue between Li’s photo sculptures and Pater’s paintings. Imbuing mundane subjects with significance, the artists closely study surfaces and experiences that simultaneously embody and reflect light. Their explorations of the everyday share a focus on the minutiae of ordinary experiences, blurring the aesthetics of boredom and attention. The compositions’ first-person view works to activate one’s visual experience, bringing the viewer into the meticulously constructed tableaux: marks on a wall, paper flying in a sudden gust of wind, a glass of water, flat digital screens, and an exposed fluorescent bulb rendered sublime. The experience of “looking” has changed in our daily existence, becoming more passive and disembodied in an image-saturated culture. The artists are interested in reclaiming the tactility of looking–an embodied and active experience in our perceptual world. Featuring new work by both artists, this exhibition highlights the formal and conceptual dialogue between Li’s photo sculptures and Pater’s paintings. Imbuing mundane subjects with significance, the artists closely study surfaces and experiences that simultaneously embody and reflect light. Their explorations of the everyday share a focus on the minutiae of ordinary experiences, blurring the aesthetics of boredom and attention. The compositions’ first-person view works to activate one’s visual experience, bringing the viewer into the meticulously constructed tableaux: marks on a wall, paper flying in a sudden gust of wind, a glass of water, flat digital screens, and an exposed fluorescent bulb rendered sublime. The experience of “looking” has changed in our daily existence, becoming more passive and disembodied in an image-saturated culture. The artists are interested in reclaiming the tactility of looking–an embodied and active experience in our perceptual world.
︎ Press Release
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Reviews
254 36th Street, B634 (Industry City Building 2)
Brooklyn, NY 11232
info@gallery-yi.com @yigalleryny
Pablo’s Birthday at Untitled Art Fair, Miami Beach
December 6 – 10, 2023
Mona Ardeleanu, Lena Christakis, Eckart Hahn, Sarah Pater, Emily Pettigrew, and Mai Ta
︎ Wall Street Journal: Untitled Art Review: An Exuberant Fair in Miami Beach
︎ Wall Street Journal: Untitled Art Review: An Exuberant Fair in Miami Beach
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Online viewing room
Pablo’s Birthday participated in the 12th edition of Untitled Art Miami Beach 2023 with a booth concept dissecting the aesthetics of surrealism in the 21st Century. Alongside one another– Mona Ardeleanu, Lena Christakis, Eckart Hahn, Sarah Pater, Emily Pettigrew, and Mai Ta walk a fine line between reality and reverie. This collective of artists explores surrealist discourse and aesthetic concepts that seem to question reality. With their dreamlike depictions, uncanny imagery, and exploration of perception, they invite their witnesses to question the fine line between the real and the dream. Each artist's unique perspective and practice serve as a testament to the enduring relevance of surrealism’s place in the contemporary dialogue.
pablosbirthday.com
Pablo’s Birthday participated in the 12th edition of Untitled Art Miami Beach 2023 with a booth concept dissecting the aesthetics of surrealism in the 21st Century. Alongside one another– Mona Ardeleanu, Lena Christakis, Eckart Hahn, Sarah Pater, Emily Pettigrew, and Mai Ta walk a fine line between reality and reverie. This collective of artists explores surrealist discourse and aesthetic concepts that seem to question reality. With their dreamlike depictions, uncanny imagery, and exploration of perception, they invite their witnesses to question the fine line between the real and the dream. Each artist's unique perspective and practice serve as a testament to the enduring relevance of surrealism’s place in the contemporary dialogue.
Bellyache, CHART, New York
July 12 – August 18, 2023
David Aipperspach, Claudia Bitrán, Dike Blair, Dennis Congdon, Angela Dufresne, Danny Ferrell, Jackie Gendel, Maggie Hazen, Christopher K. Ho, Tristram Lansdowne, Stuart Lantry, Shona McAndrew, Whitney Oldenburg, Sarah Pater, Jagdeep Raina, Paul Rouphail, Craig Taylor, Roger White, Ziyang Wu, Ping Zheng
CHART is pleased to present Bellyache, a group exhibition curated by Shona McAndrew, featuring work by twenty artists who were either peers or professors of McAndrew’s at the Rhode Island School of Design.
“Everybody has had a bellyache. The trick is figuring out why. Is it an overindulgence in sweets or too much coffee? One’s own body revolting against oneself? A bout of anxiety from an important and long-awaited phone call? One of the greatest sources of bellyaches for artists can undoubtedly be traced back to an anxiety of influence. Painters cannot help but sneak their heroes into each color choice and brushstroke, sculptors into every material choice or conceptual strategy. As such, I am interested in drawing upon a group of artists who I have learned with and artists who I have learned from. Using my cohort as a case study, I hope to witness how ideas and stylistic approaches can migrate through different practices and how micro-lineages form and fracture over time.” - Shona McAndrew
︎ Press Release
74 Franklin Street
New York, NY 10013
chart-gallery.com
!["Bellyache" at CHART.]()
Time, Pablo’s Birthday, New York
February 23 – March 31, 2023
Pablo's Birthday is pleased to inaugurate 2023 with the group exhibition Time, organized by writer, curator, and artist Ryan Steadman, which showcases the work of Leonard Baby, Joan Boy, Helena Foster, Brandon Elijah Johnson, Sarah Pater, Emily Pettigrew, Giordanne Salley, and Arisa Yoshioka. Time features painters who use techniques, symbols, or imagery that infer a desire to stop, slow down, or reverse time through their paintings. Together, these works ask you to ponder and play with how we perceive the passing of time.
︎ Press Release
105 Hudson Street, # 410
New York, NY 10013
info@pablosbirthday.com
Books and Things, Helen J Gallery, Los Angeles
September 10 – October 22, 2022
Featuring works by Hiejin Yoo, Bowei Yang, Keanu Kemar Wynter, Sophie Varin, Benjamin Tong, Shin Kyungchul, Sarah Pater, Park Junghae, Eun-Ha Paek, Pia Ortuño, Alex Nguyen-Vo, Sarana Mehra, Adam Lovitz, Candice Lin, Jung Yoory, Jeon Hyunsun, Han Sungwoo, Alex Delapena, Max Cleary, Heather Cleary, Michelle J Chun, Mistuko Brooks, and David Aipperspach. Curated by Cameron Masters. ︎ Press Release
Opening reception: Saturday, September 10, 5-8pm.
929 Cole Ave.
Los Angeles, CA 90038
Sarah Pater: on the circular track of days, Lighthouse Works, Fishers Island
July 21 – September 23, 2022
Opening reception: July 21, 2022.
Lighthouse Works
66 Hound Ln.
Fishers Island, NY
“Everywhere, in the day’s last, lingering light, liaisons and arrangements were being made. […] Love comes and goes, pitching its mansion. And on the circular track of days, it appears that Dread is gaining on Devotion every second.”
- Joy Williams, Breaking and Entering
This exhibition of new work from Sarah Pater brings together two groups of paintings made during and in response to her time in residence at the Lighthouse Works.
For six weeks between late October and early December of 2021, Pater painted the view of the Fishers Island Sound through the window of the studio at the same time each day. Making these small paintings of the sunset was a way for her to structure her days and devote time to a direct, physical experience of the environment. To paint the changing light as the sun rapidly diminishes involves speed, immediacy, and memory. The shapes of clouds and the particular colors of air and light shift every second. Inevitably, the act becomes one of self-reflection and abstraction, a confrontation with time and looking, and a glimpse of the astonishing phenomena all around.
The cycle of five 12x16-inch paintings consists of more mediated and composed views. The paintings depict a series of still-lifes with flattened, incongruous geometry but for a shared horizon. Sky, water, landscape, and the familiar blunted corners of omnipresent tech products frame hyper-still subjects — half a glass of water, some fruit — on an altar-like windowsill, painted reverently at real scale. The hand-painted, near-textureless surfaces lack visible sequential order in their construction, contradicting the layered mark-making that typically implies painterly time. Color bends from quotidian and observational toward experiential and uncanny. The subjects, when they appear, turn alien and alienated. Taken together, these paintings allude to the circular rhythm of days as they fold from evening into night and back out again.
The snake and the ouroboros — the symbol of a snake swallowing its tail that features widely in ancient iconography — often refer to the cyclical nature of death, life, and regeneration. Snakes can also evoke a chilly sense of lurking malevolence, the snake in the grass. Sometimes a snake is just a snake, a wild animal suddenly encountered on a trail somewhere, passing through.
Not Always What They Seem, Peep Projects, Philadelphia
June 13 – August 15, 2022
Amie Cunat, Austin Eddy, Mark Thomas Gibson, Sarah Pater, and Katarina Riesing.
Opening reception: Friday, June 17, 6-8 pm.
2424 Coral St. #221
Philadelphia, PA 19125
“Things are not always what they seem; the first appearance deceives many”
-Phaedrus
For Peep’s summer group show, five artists are brought together whose works reveal deeper meanings through symbolism, biomorphic shapes, emotive color and subversive imagery. Amie Cunat’s work confronts familiarity by exaggerating or omitting characteristics from an observed source. Cunat’s vivid and colorful canvases are filled with swirling biomorphic shapes, appearing like licks of flames, tangles of vegetal growth, and decorative paisleys. Austin Eddy’s vibrant painting of birds presents a way to understand the strain engrossed in the human experience—whether we are caged, soaring through the sky, or something in between. Mark Thomas Gibson's work reveals a vision of a satirical, dystopian America where every viewer is implicated as a potential character within our shared narrative. Sarah Pater’s paintings reveal familiar scenes rendered strange—the quotidian turning otherworldly, sometimes terrifyingly so. At first glance Katarina Riesing’s dyed paintings on stretched silk and colored pencil drawings betray an infatuation with laborious detail and rich material, but the insistence on close croppings, and awkward, unsightly I or uncomfortably erotic aspects of the body, reveal surreptitious squirming.
Light Accumulation, PULP, Holyoke, MA
June 18 – July 17, 2022
Ilana Harris-Babou, Kelly Hain, and Sarah Pater. Curated by Ali Osborn.
PULP is pleased to present Light Accumulation, a three-person exhibition that addresses the fragility of concepts like “cool and collected”, “peace and quiet”, “happiness and wellbeing”. The selected artworks present scenarios wherein a tenuous equilibrium has been reached by the steady accrual of ballpoint pen strokes, performed labor, or subjects painted in illusionistic space. In each piece there is the implication that the balance might be easily tipped—the dream turned nightmare, the uncanny rendered real—by the addition of a single extra snail, another tap from a bird at the window pane, or a final swing of the ceramic hammer.
The three artists use a range of media and approaches to arrive at their enigmatic tableaux. Sarah Pater paints facsimiles, at once pristine and unsettling, of familiar forms caught in flattened, near-abstract space: snails crawling across a cool, dark countertop; tapered candlesticks standing, frozen out of time, on an impeccably smooth table cloth. Ilana Harris-Babou sculpts dysfunctional ceramics and films scenes that parody home improvement language to discuss reparations and systemic racism. In Kelly Hain’s drawings—there are traditional works on paper and an animated film—black and white worlds undergo such continuous change (from fire, flood, or refraction) that transformation appears as a harmonious constant.
Light Accumulation is curated by Ali Osborn, an artist and educator based in Brooklyn, NY.
Still Going, Taymour Grahne Projects, London
January 22 - February 19, 2022
Alessandro Teoldi, Alexandria Tarver, Ellen Siebers, Sarah Pater, Japeth Mennes, Matthew Zaccari, Padma Rajendran, Philip Hinge, and Veronika Pausova. Curated by 106 Green (Holly Coulis, Ridley Howard, & Mitchell Wright).
Surface Tension, Ortega y Gasset, Brooklyn
February 5 - March 20, 2022
Dexter Ciprián, Christina Graham, Rachel Granofsky, Kirsten Lamb, Caitlin MacBride, and Sarah Pater. Curated by Lauren Whearty.
Spring, Baker Gallery, West Chester University, West Chester, PA
August 30 – October 15, 2021
Matt Bollinger, Angelina Gualdoni, Annette Hur, Vera Iliatova, Breehan James, Caitlin MacBride, Sangram Majumda, Joshua Marsh, Sarah Pater, Zahava Rozman, Amy Talluto, and Todd Arsenault/Kristopher Benedict. Organized by Kristopher Benedict.
Fitting Out the Outfitters, Accordion Studios, Providence, RI
August 27 – September 27, 2021
Work by David Aipperspach, Anthony Bragg, Irmak Canevi, Steven KP & Tyler Mills, Kris Mortensen, Tyler O’Grady, Sarah Pater, Fernando Pezzino, and Martin Smick.
Slow Burn, Baker Gallery, West Chester University, West Chester, PA
January 21 – February 22, 2020
Slow Burn brings together artists whose work rewards in-person apprehension. Through optical subtleties, unusual surface and material interactions, and iterative processes, this work resists quick circulation and reclaims a physical, embodied experience of looking for the willing viewer. Work by Seth Cameron, Anthony Campuzano, Micah Danges, Jessica Dickinson, Angela Dufresne, Ava Hassinger, Dona Nelson, and Richard Ryan. Organized by David Aipperspach & Sarah Pater.
