Artist Spotlight: Sarah Tortora
November 17, 2016
“I create sculptural works hovering between comfortable semblance and cold sovereignty, consisting of structures that flirt with the likeness to historical artifacts, utilitarian fixtures, Modern furniture, architecture, or mechanisms of display. Their anthropomorphic scale suggests the potential for human intervention, but they remain amalgams deliberately elusive to classification, performing parallel to language but remaining outside of it. These works become sites for projection: as facsimiles of archetypal objects, impostors of icons, or signs that reiterate the logic of their own presentation.”- Sarah Tortora
Sarah Tortora (b.1988; New Haven, CT) is a sculptor currently working between Connecticut and Vermont. She received an MFA from the University of Pennsylvania in 2013 and attended residencies at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, the MacDowell Colony, and Yaddo shortly thereafter. In 2016, Sarah mounted solo exhibitions at GRIN Gallery (Providence, RI), Reynolds Fine Art (New Haven, CT), and CAS Arts Center (Livingston Manor, NY). She is currently the 2015-2016 Alice C. Cole ’42 Fellow in Studio Art at Wellesley College. Her works Ascendant (2014), In the First Place (2014-15), Septum (2015), Untitled (shroud) (2014), Untitled (-un) (2015) are on view now as a part of our current exhibition, Darkwater Revival: After Terry Adkins.
She says about Terry, “my conversations with Terry were always rooted in his confidence toward the boundless potential of the present rather than its quantifiable statistics. I strive to possess a similar generosity of openness that Terry extended toward the world, with the understanding that artifacts of the past are anything but fixed, and bear ever-expansive possibilities for the future.”