For our residency, I will be developing an piece based on a war memorial in my hometown of Lafayette, CA. After meeting with the group, I am really excited to go forward with the mirrored box idea. I love the idea of a person sticking their head in a box for all its metaphors, and hope to turn this image inside out, by creating a meaningful experience inside the box. Inside, video of the actual memorial will be projected on all five sides using mirrors and a screen. Rather than the one-to-one ratio of the actual memorial, the repetition suggests the infinite and ongoing cost of war. The person’s head will block some of the imagery, and i’m also wondering if their head might repeat infinitely! Either way, the person getting in their own way of seeing the information is important to me. I will also make a looping soundtrack from some of the documentary footage, which I imagine will be abstract (this needs some further thought).
It was such a wonderful first meeting and I can’t wait to see you all again.
About Sarah
Sarah Nelson Wright is a Brooklyn based artist and educator from the San Francisco Bay Area. She creates interdisciplinary media projects about the urban experience that explore the changing city and investigate avenues for intervention. Her work encompasses video, installation, interactive sculpture and public art.
Wright’s projects include THE NEWTOWN CREEK ARMADA (2012-2013) – a public art project exploring a New York City Superfund site; LOCATIONS & DISLOCATION (2008-2012) – a project chronicling displacement in the urban environment; and BROOKLYN MAKES (2009) – a site-specific video installation documenting manufacturing in North Brooklyn. Her work has been exhibited internationally in galleries and festivals, including the Museum of Contemporary African Diasporan Arts (New York), Mostra de Artes (Sao Paulo, Brazil), ACVic Center for Contemporary Arts (Vic, Spain), UnionDocs (NY), Conflux Festival (NY), Dumbo Arts Festival (NY) and Proteus Gowanus (NY).
Wright holds a BA in American Studies from Yale and an MFA in Integrated Media Arts from Hunter College. She has received grants from Brooklyn Arts Council, The Hudson River Foundation, Brooklyn Community Foundation & FEAST Brooklyn and has been an artist-in-residence at _gaia studio and the School of Making Thinking. She is an Assistant Professor of Digital Media at Marymount Manhattan College.
