Sarah Tortora: Witness Mark
WITNESS MARK
A SOLO-EXHIBITION BY SARAH TORTORA
WINNER OF THE NAPOLEON 2018 OPEN CALL
Witness Mark is comprised of sculptures that ostentatiously merge manufactured materials into organic fantastical forms, amalgamations that both parody and actualize impossible illustrations or iterations of geological time. A “witness mark” is commonly known in artistic or manufacturing practices as a line, groove, seam, or register that indicates its alignment to a larger whole or boundary. Witness marks are proto-language, performing through the most minimal means necessary to designate a sculptural position in space.
These Romantic prop-like sculptures reference Greek vase painting, geological core samples, and Euclidean space-time diagrams, and are made from paper pulp, resin, wood, and found geodes/mineral deposits. These references conflate human scale at its most essential with a scale of geological history impossible to fathom, akin to Timothy Morton’s description of a hyperobject: entities of such vast temporal and spatial dimensions that defeat traditional ideas about what a thing is in the first place.
ABOUT THE ARTIST:
Sarah Tortora (b. 1988, New Haven, CT) received an MFA from the University of Pennsylvania in 2013. In 2016, Sarah mounted solo exhibitions at GRIN (Providence, RI), Reynolds Fine Art (New Haven, CT), and CAS Arts Center (Livingston Manor, NY). Sarah has been an artist in residence at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, the MacDowell Colony, Yaddo, and Ox-Bow School of Art, among others. She was the 2015-2016 Alice C. Cole ’42 Fellow in Studio Art at Wellesley College, and currently is a yearlong artist-in-residence as the Visual Arts Coordinator at Vermont Studio Center in Johnson, Vermont.
Opening Reception
First Friday, July 6
6pm – 10pm
NAPOLEON
319 N 11th Street, 2L
Philadelphia, PA
Exhibition Dates: 7.6.18 – 8.26.18
Gallery Hours: Saturdays and Sundays 2pm – 6pm or by appointment
NAPOLEON 