Fragments of the Ineffable: Sara Frantz at Left Field Gallery
By Brenda Tan
In a dialogue of contradictions, Left Field Gallery’s Safety in the Shade—a solo exhibition of works by San Luis Obispo based artist Sara Frantz—celebrates the synthesis of perspectives while paying homage to their singularity. Through her work, Frantz expresses the alienation and reciprocity of an age of technology in which we find ourselves more connected, yet lonelier than ever.
Safety in the Shade is not a reductive vilification of technology but a response to its ramifications, both good and bad. The conversation between technology and tradition is ingrained into the medium of the work—oil on canvas paintings conceptualized through digital means and intended to preserve a digitized appearance. Franz comments, “I was brainstorming them on my phone using this sketchy horrible app to get the idea down. Having something digital at my fingertips removes my control, but it frees up the work and creates a looser experience.”
Sara Frantz, Fake Space
The supple gouache surface of the works is intended to mediate the ostensibly flat and digital landscape, however the pandemic has converted Safety in the Shade into an online exhibition. This morass of endless conversion, from digital origins into canvas painting only to return to their digital roots, emphasizes the artist’s intent to interrogate the derivative nature of art in the age of digitization. “Most of the art is now through the screen. I barely read anymore,” says Frantz. “Instead I listen to audiobooks, a form of reading through a person interpreting the book to me. It doesn't exist yet it connects me to this story—a story removed and interpreted from its origins. My own work is a similar attempt to translate an experience.”
The motif of art as translation has been a through line of Frantz’s oeuvre. Her earlier works, huge landscape forests, are composed of hundreds of little triangles which coalesce into the impression of foliage. “Disneyland was my introduction to art, the ultimate simulacra,” Frantz says, “I loved looking at the landscape behind a snow-white film, huge landscape of forests composed of little leaves made of Xs and squiggles—animated marks that impersonate the landscape. My first real connection with landscape art is this idea of simulated space.” Take Out of Context and Overwhelmed by Space, a portrait of a window ornamented by abstract red lines. Here, perspective is mediated by embellishments which prevent the viewer from seeing the image as reality. Perspective becomes the composition of infinitesimal fragments that coalesce into the picture.
Sara Frantz, The Unbelievers
Sara Frantz, Longing for Closeness
For Frantz, fragmentation is the result of the brain’s inability to comprehend the magnitude of the ineffable. “No one can encompass fantastic experiences into one painting, but your brain makes an effort to take this experience and to compress it into one image. When I try to recall these experiences, I don't think of the whole thing. I think of fragments and images and I try to reconcile those humbling experiences in which we are shown how small we are in the universe. How tiny of a blip this life is or this painting or election.” One can also think of fragmentation as the multiplicity of perspectives each individual person adopts in the face of the ineffable. Technology has exacerbated the different lenses through which we can interpret information.
Sara Frantz, This Makes Me Uncomfortable
Sara Frantz, Out of Context and Overwhelmed by Space
Her perspective on desire as a chaotic matrix of potentialities gains relevancy in the current soico-political moment. “I originally thought of these paintings as desire caves. I was thinking about the original definition of desire, désirée. It means hope thwarted—to wait from the stars. We often think of desire as something we control, but at the root we are waiting at the stars to bestow upon us our desires. Desire is not something we as individuals hold or can control, thus it is chaotic and part of the universe,” notes Frantz. “Since political events in 2016, the idea that we are no longer in control has become prevalent, and I started thinking about what my perspective is and what someone else’s perspective is. Two different egos can create a barrier that becomes especially poignant in politics, a false barrier that halts real action and real understanding. But those barriers are often false. If we took a moment to care about others, we could move forward. I hope for a world in which more people make the decision to care about others. The outcomes of our points of view might manifest in different ways but at the root we probably have something in common. People feel hopeless in the cave looking out at the world. We are so far away from one another, but we feel desire in the same way.
“In a post-Covid world and in this current political climate—particularly during the Black Lives Matter movement. All these things have a lot of energy. What does it mean to make energy? How will art change because of it? I don't think anybody really knows that yet. For me it has brought into sharp focus this idea of how isolation and interacting with the world from a greater distance—through Zoom through masks through a greater space—has changed how I see the world. How can that not affect the work?”
Sara Frantz, Installation view, Safety in the Shade, Left Field Gallery
Safety in the Shade, a solo exhibition of works by Sara Frantz is on exhibition June 6 to June 28, 2020 at Left Field Gallery, 1036 Los Osos Valley Road, Los Osos.
