SARA SISUN
My series of paintings for my master’s thesis at the San Francisco Art Institute was a series of large scale, oil on linen paintings of contemporary nudes in an apocalyptic Arcadia. The paintings carry art historical connotations, both through handling and composition (suggestive of Sargent and Bacon) as well as through subject matter (as a re-appropriation of Eakins and the Pre-Raphaelites.)
My process involved the documentation and restaging of rituals particular to a cooperative community on the Stanford campus. At this house, hummus is made in nothing but socks, an illegal trampoline is stashed in the backyard, and the solstice is celebrated with a ribbon colored maypole. The humor and irony in this nostalgia for flower power functions simultaneously as a sincere expression of creativity and community, and here manifests as a giant ketchup fight.
Through a narrative and literary depiction of place, bacchanal and disaster converge, mimicking the cognitive confusion we experience in heightened states of emotion. I draw imagery from current events, as well as mythological and folkloric archtypes. The implication is of a wider disaster, observed from a backyard or park. In this way, the transitional phase of college-age young adults is compared to the changing state of the natural world. Innocence and landscape are destabilized. In an effort to depict the complexity of these transitions, my style varies between the competing forces of rationalism, realism, and romanticism. The effect is to upset what is comforting in the paintings, as well as to play with the boarder between high and low imagery.
The scale has a narrative and cinematic effect in order to deliver a sensation of impactful immediacy. Points of disjoint that occur in the transition from photo to painting, or that occur in the painting process, imply an alternative reality, a place for the unconscious to surface as playful or ominous.
My intention is to shed a sulfurous light on our notions of the beautiful and the hysterical. As well as to destroy and reinvent the tradition of the classical nude, injecting it with a transfusion of both the horror and beauty of contemporary young adult life.
My other bodies of work do not seek dialogue in a particular conceptual arena. Instead, they are places to meditate and practice elements of technique, as well as create mood and hint at narrative. These small works develop from photos I alter digitally after stumbling upon them at flea markets, photography blogs, magazines and newspapers.