PASADENA, CA— Supplyframe DesignLab presents Pasadena-based artist Sarah Umles in a solo exhibition, Unearthed. The show runs from May 25 – July 28, 2024 and opens with a public reception on Saturday, May 25th from 2-5pm.
Umles’s solo exhibition at DesignLab features the premiere collection of artworks in her ongoing investigation into anthropogenic causes of environmental imbalance and the climate crisis, as well as their impacts on the Earth and its inhabitants. Unearthed is an arts-based research project at the nexus of technology, media, consumerism, anthropocentrism, and land politics. Through multimedia installations incorporating found objects, mass-manufactured consumer products, industrial materials, natural elements, and archival media, Umles considers chaos, corrosion, death, and grief at the monumental scale of societal decay, species extinctions, and ecological collapse.
“I initiated the Unearthed project in the fall of 2022, and I feel that this is just the beginning of a much longer process of interrogation and response,” Umles commented. “I keep returning to a quote from artist Julie Mehretu. She said, ‘There is no such thing as just landscape. The actual landscape is politicized through the events that take place on it. And I don’t think it’s possible for me in general to think about the American landscape without thinking about the colonial history and the colonial violence of that narrative. What [is] interesting [is] that… both annihilation and then preservation shortly after can exist on the same geographic landscape.’”
Sarah Umles is a queer-femme Ashkenazi Jewish artist, born in Germany before the fall of the Berlin Wall. She currently stewards Gabrielino-Tongva tribal land in Pasadena. Her work explores how social/cultural identity and self-knowing are constructed through our relationships with material culture, visual media, nature, and technology. Through interstitial practices, she seeks to subvert systems of oppression—namely: patriarchy, white supremacy, capitalism, and anthropocentrism.
Umles earned her Master’s in Arts Administration & Policy at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and her Bachelor of Arts in Creative Writing with a minor in Film & Visual Culture at the University of California, Riverside. Her interdisciplinary work has been shown internationally in both traditional and alternative spaces, most notably at the California Museum of Photography, CA; Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, IL; Franconia Sculpture Park, MN; Stove Works, TN; Annmarie Sculpture Garden & Arts Center, MA; Art Center Highland Park, IL; Gallery 787, CA; and Czong Institute for Contemporary Art, South Korea.
Sarah Umles is a recipient of the 2023-2024 City of Pasadena Individual Artist Grant. This exhibition was made possible in part by the Pasadena Arts & Culture Commission and the City of Pasadena Cultural Affairs Division.
