Sarah Sweeney
Damnatio Memoriae - Chuck
Sarah Sweeney received her BA in Studio Art from Williams College and an MFA in Digital Media from Columbia University School of the Arts and is currently Associate Professor of Art at Skidmore College.
Using the medium of photography to conjure the unseen and unspoken, Sweeney creates visible desire, anxiety, fantasy, and loss shared narratives that have been exiled from photo albums and Instagram feeds.
On the computer Sweeney is like a skin grafter, taking small bites of photographs she builds expanses of newness and inventing material space.
In these photographs, limbs become twisted and contorted, landscapes become elongated and exaggerated, bodies and spaces disappear and reappear.
From the artist:
"These visual contradictions ask the audience complicated questions about what it means to see in the culture of photography.
Can you see loss? When we pose with our friends and family in photographs, what parts of ourselves are erased? How do we use photographs to remember, and what happens if we choose to forget?"
Sweeney is the creator of The Forgetting Machine, an iPhone app commissioned by the new media organization Rhizome.
Her work has appeared nationally and internationally in exhibitions at locations including the Orange County Center for Contemporary Art, the Los Angeles Center for Digital Art, the New Jersey State Museum, the Black and White Gallery, and the UCR/California Photography Museum.
