Artist Statement
Sarah Skwira is a lens-based artist who uses photography and video as a way to mediate the world around her. Inspired by a long look, her current project is a photographic meditation on the process of aging and decay. Using her own body and domestic surroundings, she photographs moments of atrophy. Split ends and wilting vegetables are symbols for the breakdown all living things endure. The investigation into these natural processes of degradation is motivated by a feeling of internal unrest. Growing up Catholic, she was instilled with ideals of religion and that human existence was substantial in the eyes of god. As she’s experienced life and began to question these ideals, she is searching for more tangible proof in the importance of her own existence. Skwira builds an archive of images as an act of catharsis that opens an endless investigation. Her previous work has addressed the relationships she has with her parents, specifically her father’s struggle with pain management and addiction and the expectations placed on her by her mother and society. Skwira was born and raised in Western Massachusetts before getting her BFA at the Massachusetts College of Art and Design in 2010. She is the 2011 recipient of the Massachusetts Cultural Council Artist Fellowship. Her work has been shown nationally including in Boston, Seattle, Portland, and Chicago. A selection of her photographs are currently a part of the Pacific Northwest Photography Viewing Drawers at the Blue Sky Gallery in Portland Oregon.
View Sarah’s website
“Over the last two years, Sarah has explored a range of technical and conceptual approaches with performance, video and sculpture. In Split Ends, she re-enlists her beloved 4×5 camera to distill her quotidian experience to exquisite, almost melancholic renderings. These images are simultaneously exotic and modest, unique and intimate – yet achingly familiar.”
– Rebecca Cummins, Professor of Photo/Media
Committee
- Ellen Garvens (Photo/Media)
- Rebecca Cummins (Photo/Media)
- Aaron Flint Jamison (Photo/Media)
- Amie McNeel (3D4M)
- Tivon Rice (DXARTS)
