Portfolio: art.sara-cannon.com
“life is short, art is long”
Seneca said that quote in his essay “on the shortness of life”
What we have of our ancestors and what we’ve learned about ancient cultures all point to art - expression of war, paintings documenting leaders, pottery, poetry. there is a longevity to these things. All that was left in the ashes of the people of Pompeii was their crafted jewelry that they were wearing. Art will transcend time, culture, teach, instruct, and inspire. Art is long.
Artistic Statement of 2011
Portfolio: art.sara-cannon.com
here are all my art blog posts
Artistic Statement of 2008
My art is in a state of exploration. I am currently dealing with specific concepts and attempting to utilize different mediums for conveyance. After struggling to portray concepts though specific mediums with varying success and failure, I have ended up determining that I need to fit the medium to the concept.
Over the past year I have extended my boundaries, using mediums with which I did not feel comfortable. I am transitioning from drawing and design to large installations and sculpture, mixed media work, wood, and computer transference. The concepts are there – but the means of conveyance is lacking.
The concept that I want to specifically deal with over the next year is the ethics behind the nature of creation in association with destruction. In order to create, we must destroy something else. The building of a city must plow down nature. Roads cut into mountains. The war and destroying of nations happens in order to build an empire. Even nurturing of the human body destroys animal and plant life. An explosion of a star creates other stars.
I am exploring this concept in the relation it has to humanity, culture, and our lives – building, science, and ethics. When an atom is smashed it produces mathematical spirals – people create and destroy over and over. When is new creation worth the destruction? When is the structure worth more than the field it occupies? When is the founding of a democracy ethically worth the destruction of war?
I began work on this concept in the “Everyone Takes Notes, Everything Has Fields” dual show with artist Jason Burgess on March 2008 at Happi Boutique. I made a sculpture titled “The Aftermath” (note work sample #1) from found materials (wood, roots, tie wire, lath, rocks, bulldozer arm) all from a clear cut site at Moss Rock Preserve in Hoover, AL, with the exception of the lath which is from a house being gutted in Southside. The sculpture explores the aftermath of the destruction before the creation of something. (in this case, it is a strip mall in the woods) The wood was from fallen trees, the roots dug up from the ground, the rocks red Alabama sandstone not found on the surface of the forest, but dug up. It is the effects of the destruction – speaking to the fiery dilemma of what is worth preserving – and the moral aspect of suburban sprawl.
Also at the show I displayed a series of four drawings titled “Everything Has Fields Underneath.” The drawings are mixed medium (transfer, ink, marker, charcoal, found paper) and deal with the same concept. The transfer aspect of the drawings are particularly important to me as the original image was made on the computer, printed, transferred to the paper, and then physically manipulated. It was a bridging of digital medium degraded and manipulated into a physical medium. This is something that I know that I need to further explore. Ironically, it is also worth noting that the art I am making is in itself a form of destruction in order to create.