Sara Tack
shrinking
"shrinking"- series
water color, gouache and graphite, 2021.
"My work thematically is about how culture communicates through media, shaping our responses and world views. I work abstractly across multiple mediums at any given time: from photography, painting, and digital prints to animated pieces using language.
During Covid, the imperfections of aging became apparent watching my face get worn and my spine hunch over, as I spent endless time on Zoom. Covid only emphasized navigating a world that perpetuates the value of youthful perfection, especially as a women, isolated. No matter how hard I try to embrace this natural process gracefully, or hope technology can control it, the images of twenty-somethings keep showing up on my Instagram feed.
Decided to paint this inevitability in water color or gouache, because like aging, they are difficult mediums to control. Using squares as a vessel, the graphite structures struggle to brace the painted frame. As the body shrinks the bones get weak, the skin wrinkles and sags. Aging also shrinks us in immaterial value. And women, even more so than men, become invisible.
This series of small and quiet paintings hopes to question the noise of perfection promised by the technological world to find beauty, respect, and value in the shriveling, the wrinkling, and the shrinking."
water color, gouache and graphite, 2021.
"My work thematically is about how culture communicates through media, shaping our responses and world views. I work abstractly across multiple mediums at any given time: from photography, painting, and digital prints to animated pieces using language.
During Covid, the imperfections of aging became apparent watching my face get worn and my spine hunch over, as I spent endless time on Zoom. Covid only emphasized navigating a world that perpetuates the value of youthful perfection, especially as a women, isolated. No matter how hard I try to embrace this natural process gracefully, or hope technology can control it, the images of twenty-somethings keep showing up on my Instagram feed.
Decided to paint this inevitability in water color or gouache, because like aging, they are difficult mediums to control. Using squares as a vessel, the graphite structures struggle to brace the painted frame. As the body shrinks the bones get weak, the skin wrinkles and sags. Aging also shrinks us in immaterial value. And women, even more so than men, become invisible.
This series of small and quiet paintings hopes to question the noise of perfection promised by the technological world to find beauty, respect, and value in the shriveling, the wrinkling, and the shrinking."
Sara Tack is an artist and designer whose work creates social commentary about contemporary American culture. She has been exhibited locally and worldwide, at the Museum of Art at the Dick Institute (Scotland), Nickle Arts Museum (Calgary), Vancouver, Video Poem Festival, Centro De La Imagen (Mexico City), The Kitchen (NYC), Virginia Film Festival, and is in the permanent collection of The Herbert F. Johnson Museum at Cornell University. Sara is a professor at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in the Department of Communication & Media.
